
Glass r/J di^^ ^ . 

Book Jj'Z -^ 



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LECTURES 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 






AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



By WILLIAM HAZLITT. 



®Jirtr ISbitfon. 



EDITED B Y HIS SON. 




LONDON: JOHN TEMPLEMAN, 
24«, REGENT STREET. 



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.f(^' 



LONDON: 

PRINTED BY CHARLES REYNELIr;^ 
LITTLE PULTENEY STREET. 



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AS A TRIBUTE 
TO PUBLIC VIRTUE AND PRIVATE WORTH 
AND AS A MEMORIAL OF LONG AND TRIED FRIENDSHIP, 

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, IN THE 

NAME OF ITS AUTHOR, 

TO 



BASIL MONTAGU. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The former editions of tlie Lectures, originally deli- 
vered by the author at the Surrey Institution in 1818, 
and published in the same year, havhag become ex- 
hausted, the present reprint has been undertaken, for 
the purpose of supplying the constant and increasing 
demand which is made for it. 

There is no feature in the retrospect of the last 
few years, more important and more dehghtful than 
the steady advance of an improved taste in literature : 
and both as a cause and as a consequence of this, the 
works of WiUiam Hazlitt, which heretofore have been 
duly appreciated only by the fcAV, are now having 
ample justice done them by the many. With refer- 
ence to the present work, the Edhiburgh Review 
eloquently observes, " Mr Hazlitt possesses one noble 
quahty at least for the office which he has chosen, in 
the intense admiration and love which he feels for 
the great authors on whose excellencies he chiefly 
dwells. His rehsh for their beauties is so keen, that 
while he describes them, the pleasures which they 
impart become almost palpable to the sense, and we 
seem, scarcely in a figure, to feast and banquet on 
their ^nectared sweets.' He introduces us almost 
corporally into the divine presence of the great of 
old time — enables us to hear the living oracles of 
wisdom drop from their lips — and makes us par- 
takers, not only of those joys which they difliised, 
but of those which they felt in the inmost recesses of 



VI ADVERTISEMENT. 

their souls. He draws aside the veil of time with a 
hand tremulous with mingled delight and reverence ; 
and descants with kindling enthusiasm, on all the 
delicacies of that picture of genius which he discloses. 
His intense admiration of intellectual beauty seems 
always to sharpen his critical faculties. He per- 
ceives it, by a kind of intuitive power, how deeply 
soever it may be buried in rubbish ; and separates 
it in a moment from a.11 that would encumber or 
deface it. At the same time, he exhibits to us those 
hidden sources of beauty, not like an anatomist, but 
like a lover. He does not coolly dissect the form to 
show the springs whence the blood flows all eloquent, 
and the divine expression is kindled ; but makes us 
feel in the sparkling or softened eye, the wreathed 
smile, and the tender bloom. In a word, he at once 
analyzes and describes — so that our enjoyments of 
loveliness are not chilled, but brightened by our ac- 
quaintance with their inward sources. The know- 
ledge communicated in his lectures breaks no sweet 
enchantment, nor chills one feeling of youthful joy- 
His criticisms, while they extend our insight into the 
causes of poetical excellence, teach us, at the same 
time, more keenly to enjoy, and more fondly to re- 
vere it." 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Introductory. — General View of the Subject ... 1 



LECTURE II. 

On the Dramatic Writers contemporary with Shaks- 
peare, Lyly, Marlowe, Heywood, Middleton, and 
Rowley . _ . . .36 



LECTURE III. 
On Marston, Chapman, Decker, and Webster . 87 

LECTURE IV, 

On Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and 
Massinger . . . . .130 

LECTURE V. 

On single Plays, Poems, &c., the Four P's, the Re- 
turn from Parnassus, Gammer Gurton's Needle, 
and other Works . . . .175 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

LECTURE VI. 

PAGE 

On Miscellaneous Poems, F. Beaumont, P. Fletcher, 
Drayton, Daniel, &c. , Sir P. Sidney's Arcadia, and 
Sonnets . . . . . .208 

LECTURE VIL 

Character of Lord Bacon's Works — compared as to 
style with Sir Thomas Brown and Jeremy Taylor 260 

LECTURE VIII. 
On the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Literature — on 
the German Drama, contrasted with that of the 
Age of Elizabeth . . . .295 



LECTURES 

ON THE 

AGE OF ELIZABETH, &c. 



LECTURE I.— INTRODUCTORY. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

The age of Elizabeth was distinguished, be- 
yond, perhaps, any other in our history, by 
a number of great men, famous in different 
ways, and whose nanies have come down to 
us with unblemished honours ; statesmen, war- 
riors, divines, scholars, poets, and philoso- 
phers, Raleigh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and 
higher and more sounding still, and still more 
frequent in our mouths, Shakspeare, Spen- 
ser, Sidney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, men whom fame has eternised in her 
long and lasting scroll, and who, by their 
words and acts, were benefactors of their 
country, and ornaments of human nature. 
Their attainments of different kinds bore the 
same general stamp, and was sterling: what 
they did had the mark of their age and country 



2 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

upon it. Perhaps the genius of Great Britain 
(if I may so speak without offence or flattery) 
never shone out fuller or brighter, or looked 
more like itself, than at this period. Our writers 
and great men had something in them that 
savoured of the soil from which they grew : 
they were not French, they were not Dutch, 
or German, or Greek, or Latin ; they were truly 
English. They did not look out of them- 
selves to see what they should be ; they sought 
for truth and nature, and found it in them- 
selves. There was no tinsel, and but little art; 
they were not the spoiled children of affectation 
and refinement, but a bold, vigorous, inde- 
pendent race of thinkers, with prodigious 
strength and energy, with none but natural 
grace, and heartfelt, unobtrusive delicacy. They 
were not at 8^11 sophisticated. The mind of 
their country was great in them, and it pre- 
vailed. With their learning and unexampled 
acquirement they did not forget that they were 
men : with all their endeavours after excel- 
lence they did not lay aside the strong original 
bent and character of their minds. What they 
performed was chiefly nature's handy work ; 
and time has claimed it for his own. — To these, 
however, might be added others not less learned, 
nor with a scarce less happy vein, but less for- 
tunate in the event, who, though as renowned 
in their day, have sunk into ''mere oblivion," 
and of whom the only record (but that the 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 3 

noblest) is to be found in their works. Their 
works arid their names, '' poor, poor, dumb 
names," are all that remains of such men as 
Webster, Decker, Marston, Marlowe, Chap- 
man, Heywood, Middleton, and Rowley ! 
" How lov'd, how honour'd once avails them 
not :'' though they were the friends and fellow- 
labourers of Shakspeare, sharing his fame and 
fortunes with him, the rivals of Jonson, and 
the masters of Beaumont and Fletcher's well 
sung woes ! They went out one by one unno- 
ticed, like evening lights ; or w^ere swallowed 
up in the headlong torrent of puritanic zeal 
which succeeded, and swept away everything 
in its unsparing course, throwing up the wrecks 
of taste and genius at random, and at long fitful 
intervals, amidst the painted gew-gaws and fo- 
reign frippery of the reign of Charles II, and 
from which we are only now recovering the 
scattered fragments and broken images to 
erect a temple to true Fame ! How long be- 
fore it will be completed ? 

If I can do anything to rescue some of these 
writers from hopeless obscurity, and to do them 
right, without prejudice to well-deserved repu- 
tation, I shall have succeeded in what I chiefly 
propose. I shall not attempt, indeed, to adjust 
the spelling, or restore the pointing, as if 
the genius of poetry lay hid in errors of the 
press, but leaving these weightier matters of 
criticism to those who are more able and willinor 



4 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

to bear the burden, try to bring out their real 
beauties to the eager sight, " draw the curtain 
of Time, and show the picture of Genius," re- 
straining my own admiration within reasonable 
bounds. 

There is not a lower ambition, a poorer way 
of thought, than that which would confine all 
excellence, or arrogate its final accomplishment 
to the present, or modern times. We ordinarily 
speak and think of those who had the misfortune 
to write or live before us, as labouring under 
very singular privations and disadvantages in 
not having the benefit of those improvements 
which we have made, as buried in the grossest 
ignorance, or the slaves '^ of poring pedantry;" 
and we make a cheap and infallible estimate ,- 
of their progress in civilization upon a gradu- 
ated scale of perfectibility, calculated from the 
meridian of our own times. If we have pretty 
well got rid of the narrow bigotry that would 
limit all sense or virtue to our own country, 
and have fraternized, like true cosmopolites, 
with our neighbours and contemporaries, we 
have made our self-love amends by letting the 
generation we live in engross nearly all our 
admiration, and by pronouncing a sweeping 
sentence of barbarism and ignorance on our 
ancestry backwards, from the commencement 
(as near as can be) of the nineteenth, or the 
latter end of the eighteenth century. From 
thence we date a new era, the dawn oi our own 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. O 

intellect, and that of the world, like " the sacred 
influence of light'' glimmering on the confines 
of '' Chaos and old night ;'' neAv manners rise, 
and all the cumbrous ''pomp of elder days" 
vanishes, and is lost in worse than Gothic dark- 
ness. Pavilioned in the glittering pride of our 
superficial accomplishments and upstart preten- 
sions, we fancy that everything beyond that 
magic circle is prejudice and error ; and all, be- 
fore the present enlightened period, but a dull 
and useless blank in the great map of time. We 
are so dazzled with the gloss and novelty of 
modern discoveries, that we cannot take into our 
mind's eye the vast expanse, the lengthened 
perspective of human intellect, and a cloud 
hangs over and conceals its loftiest monuments, 
if they are removed to a little distance from us 
—the cloud of our own vanity and short-sight- 
edness. The modern sciolist stultifies all under- 
standing but his own, and that which he 
conceives like his own. We think, in this age 
of reason and consummation of philosophy, be- 
cause we knew nothing twenty or thirty years 
ago, and began then to think for the first time in 
our lives, that the rest of mankind were in the 
same predicament, and never knew anything 
till we did ; that the world had grown old in 
sloth and ignorance, had dreamt out its long 
minority of five thousand years in a dozing- 
state, and that it first beo;an to wake out of 
sleep, to rouse itself, and look about it, startled 



6 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

by the light of our unexpected discoveries, and 
the noise we made about them. Strange error 
of our infatuated self-love. Because the clothes 
we remember to have seen worn when we were 
children are now out of fashion, and our 
grandmothers were then old women, we con- 
ceive, with magnanimous continuity of reasoning, 
that it must have been much worse three hun- 
dred years before, and that grace, youth, and 
beauty are things of modern date — as if nature 
had ever been old, or the sun had first shone on 
our folly and presumption. Because, in a word, 
the last generation, when tottering off the stage, 
were not so active, so sprightly, and so promis- 
ing as we were, we begin to imagine that people 
formerly must have crawled about in a feeble, 
torpid state, like flies in winter, in a sort of dim 
twilight of the understandings ^'nor can we 
think what thoughts they could conceive,'' in 
the absence of all those topics that so agreeably 
enliven and diversify our conversation and lite- 
rature, mistaking the imperfection of our know- 
ledge for the defect of their organs, as if it was 
necessary for us to have a register and certificate 
of their thoughts, or as if, because they did not 
see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and 
understand with our understandings, they could 
hear, see, and understand nothing. A falser 
inference could not be drawn, nor one more 
contrary to the maxims and cautions of a wise 
humanity. " Think,'' says Shakspeare, the 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 7 

prompter of good and true feelings, ^^ there's 
livers out of Britain." So there have been 
thinkers, and great and sound ones, before our 
time. They had the same capacities that we 
have, sometimes greater motives for their exer- 
tion, and for the most part, the same subject- 
matter to w^ork upon. What we learn from 
nature, we may hope to do as well as they; what 
we learn from them we may in general expect to 
do worse. — What is, I think, as likely as any- 
thing to cure us of this overweening admiration 
of the present, and unmingled contempt for past 
times, is the looking at the finest old pictures ; 
at Raphael's heads, at Titian's faces, at Claude's 
landscapes. We have there the evidence of the 
senses, without the alterations of opinion or dis- 
guise of language. We there see the blood 
circulate through the veins (long before it was 
known that it did so), the same red and white 
*'by nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid 
on," the same thoughts passing through the 
mind and seated on the lips, the same blue sky, 
and glittering sunny vales, "where Pan, knit 
with the Graces and the Hours in dance, leads 
on the eternal spring." And we begin to feel that 
nature and the mind of man are not a thing of 
yesterday, as we had been led to suppose ; and 
that " there are more things between heaven and 
earth than were ever dreamt of in our philoso- 
phy." — Or grant that we improve, in some re- 
spects, in a uniformly progressive ratio, and build. 



8 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

Babel-high, on the foundation of other men's 
knowledge, as in matters of science and specula- 
tive inquiry, wliere^ by going often over the same 
general ground, certain general conclusions 
have been arrived at, and in the number of per- 
sons reasoning on a given subject, truth has at 
last been hit upon, and long-established error 
exploded ; yet this does not apply to cases of 
individual power and knowledge, to a million 
of things besides, in which we are still to seek as 
much as ever, and in which we can only hope 
to find, by going to the fountain-head of thought 
and experience. We are quite wrong in sup- 
posing (as we are apt to do), that we can plead 
an exclusive title to wit and wisdom, to taste 
and genius, as the net produce and clear rever- 
sion of the age we live in, and that all we have 
to do to be great is to despise those who have 
gone before us as nothing. 

Or even if we admit a saving clause in this 
sweeping proscription, and do not make the 
rule absolute, the very nature of the exceptions 
shows the spirit in which they are made. We 
single out one or two striking instances, say 
Shakspeare or Lord Bacon, which we would 
fain treat as prodigies, and as a marked con- 
trast to the rudeness and barbarism that sur- 
rounded them. These we delight to dwell 
upon and magnify ; the praise and wonder we 
heap upon their shrines are at the expense of 
the time in which they lived, and would leave 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. V 

it poor indeed. We make them out something 
more than human, ^^ matchless, divine, what 
we will," so to make them no rule for their 
age, and no infringement of the abstract claim 
to superiority which we set up. Instead of 
letting them reflect any lustre, or add any 
credit to the period of history to which they 
rightfully belong, we only make use of their 
example to insult and degrade it still more 
beneath our own level. 

It is the present fashion to speak with venera- 
tion of old English literature ; but the homage 
we pay to it is more akin to the rites of super- 
stition than the worship of true religion. Our 
faith is doubtful ; our love cold ; our know- 
ledge little or none. We now and then repeat 
the names of some of the old writers by rote, 
but we are shy of looking into their works. 
Though we seem disposed to think highly of 
them, and to give them every credit for a 
masculine and original vein of thought, as a 
matter of literary courtesy and enlargement of 
taste, we are afraid of coming to the proof, as 
too great a trial of our candour and patience. 
We regard the enthusiastic admiration of these 
obsolete authors, or a desire to make proselytes 
to a belief in their extraordinary merits, as an 
amiable weakness, a pleasing delusion ; and 
prepare to listen to some favourite passage, that 
may be referred to in support of this singular 
taste, with an incredulous smile; and are in 



10 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT- 

no small pain for the result of the hazardous 
experiment; feeling much the same awkward 
condescending disposition to patronise these 
first crude attempts at poetry and lispings of 
the Muse, as when a fond parent brings forward 
a bashful child to make a display of its wit or 
learning. We hope the best, put a good face 
on the matter, but are sadly afraid the thing 
cannot answer. — Dr Johnson said of these 
writers generally, that ^' they were sought after 
because they were scarce, and would not have 
been scarce had they been much esteemed.'^ 
His decision is neither true history nor sound 
criticism. They were esteemed, and they de- 
served to be so. 

One cause that might be pointed out here, 
as having contributed to the long continued 
neglect of our earlier writers^ lies in the very 
nature of our academic institutions, which 
unavoidably neutralizes a taste for the produc- 
tions of native genius, estranges the mind from 
the history of our own literature, and makes 
it in each successive age like a book sealed. 
The Greek and Roman classics are a sort of 
privileged text-books, the standing order of the 
day, in a University education, and leave little 
leisure for a competent acquaintance with, or 
due admiration of, a whole host of able writers 
of our own, who are suffered to moulder in 
obscurity on the shelves of our libraries, with 
a decent reservation of one or two top-names, 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 11 

that are cried up for form's sake, and to save 
the national character. Thus we keep a few 
of these always ready in capitals, and strike 
off the rest to prevent the tendency to a super- 
fluous population in the republic of letters ; in 
other words, to prevent the writers from becom- 
ing more numerous than the readers. The 
ancients are become effete in this respect, they 
no longer increase and multiply ; or if they 
have imitators among us, no one is expected to 
read, and still less to admire them. It is not 
possible that the learned professors and the 
reading public should clash in this way, or 
necessary for them to use any precautions 
against each other. But it is not the same 
with the living languages, where there is danger 
of being overwhelmed by the crowd of compe- 
titors, and pedantry has combined with igno- 
rance to cancel their unsatisfied claims. 

We afiect to wonder at Shakspeare, and one 
or two more of that period, as solitary instances 
upon record; whereas it is our own dearth of 
information that makes the waste ; for there is 
no time more populous of intellect, or more 
prolific of intellectual wealth, than the one we 
are speaking of. Shakspeare did not look upon 
himself in this light, as a sort of monster of 
poetical genius, or on his contemporaries as 
" less than smallest dwarfs," wdien he speaks 
with true, not false modesty, of himself and 
them, and of his wayward thoughts, " desiring 



12 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

this man's art, and that man's scope/' We 
fancy that there were no such men, that could 
either add to or take anything away from him, 
but such there were. He indeed overlooks and 
commands the admiration of posterity, but he 
does it from the taUe-land of the age in which 
he lived. He towered above his fellows, *'in 
shape and gesture proudly eminent," but he 
was one of a race of giants, the tallest, the 
strongest, the most graceful, and beautiful of 
them ; but it was a common and a noble brood. 
He was not something sacred and aloof from 
the vulgar herd of men, but shook hands with 
nature and the circumstances of the time, and 
is distinguished from his immediate contempo- 
raries, not in kind, but in degree and greater 
variety of excellence. He did not form a class 
or species by himself, but belonged to a class or 
species. His age was necessary to him ; nor 
could he have been wrenched from his place in 
the edifice of which he was so conspicuous a 
part, without equal injury to himself and it. 
Mr Wordsworth says of Milton, that " his 
soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." This 
cannot be said with any propriety of Shak- 
speare, who certainly moved in a constellation of 
bright luminaries, and ''drew after him a third 
part of the heavens." If we allow, for argu- 
ment's sake (or for truth's, which is better), 
that he was in himself equal to all his com- 
petitors put together ; yet there was more 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 13 

dramatic excellence in that age than in the 
whole of the period that has elapsed since. If 
his contemporaries, with their united strength, 
w^oiild hardly make one Shakspeare, certain it 
is that all his successors would not make half a 
one. With the exception of a single writer, 
Otway, and of a single play of his (^ Venice 
Preserved'), there is nobody in tragedy and 
dramatic poetry (I do not here speak of 
comedy), to be compared to the great men of 
the age of Shakspeare, and immediately after. 
They are a mighty phalanx of kindred spirits 
closing him round, moving in the same orbit, 
and impelled by the same causes in their whirl- 
ing and eccentric career. They had the same 
faults and the same excellencies ; the same 
strength, and depth, and richness, the same 
truth of character, passion, imagination, thought 
and language, thrown, heaped, massed together 
without careful polishing or exact method, but 
poured out in unconcerned profusion from the 
lap of nature and genius in boundless and 
unrivalled magnificence. The sweetness of 
Decker, the thought of Marston, the gravity 
of Chapman, the grace of Fletcher and bis 
young-eyed wit, Jonson's learned sock, the 
flowing vein of Middleton, Heywood's ease, 
the pathos of Webster, and Marlowe's deep 
designs, add a double lustre to the sweetness, 
thought, gravity, grace, wit, artless nature, 
copiousness, ease, pathos, and sublime concep- 



14 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

tions of Shakspeare's Muse. They are indeed 
the scale hj which we can best ascend to the 
true knowledge and love of him. Our admira- 
tion of them does not lessen our relish for him : 
but, on the contrary, increases and confirms it. 
For such an extraordinary combination and 
development of fancy and genius many causes 
may be assigned, and we seek for the chief of 
them in religion, in politics, in the circum- 
stances of the time, the recent diffusion of 
letters, in local situation, and in the character 
of the men who adorned that period, and 
availed themselves so nobly of the advantages 
placed within their reach. 

I shall here attempt to give a general sketch 
of these causes, and of the manner in which 
they operated to mould and stamp the poetry 
of the country at the period of which I have 
to treat ; independently of incidental and for- 
tuitous causes, for which there is no account- 
ing, but which, after all, have often the greatest 
share in determining the most important results. 

The first cause I shall mention, as contri- 
uting to this general effect, was the Reforma- 
tion, which had just then taken place. This 
event gave a mighty impulse, and increased 
activity to thought and inquiry, and agitated 
the inert mass of accumulated prejudices 
throughout Europe. The effect of the concus- 
sion was general, but the shock was greatest 
in this country. It toppled down the full-grown, 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 15 

intolerable abuses of centuries at a blow ; 
heaved the ground from under the feet of bi- 
goted faith and slavish obedience ; and the 
roar and dashing of opinions, loosened from 
their accustomed hold, might be heard like the 
noise of an angry sea, and has never yet sub- 
sided. Germany first broke the spell of mis- 
begotten fear, and gave the watchword ; but 
England joined the shout, and echoed it back 
with her island voice from her thousand cliffs 
and craggy shores, in a longer and a louder 
strain. With that cry the genius of Great 
Britain rose and threw down the gauntlet to 
the nations. There was a mighty fermentation : 
the waters were out; public opinion was in a 
state of projection. Liberty was held out to 
all to think and speak the truth. Men's brains 
were busy ; their spirits stirring ; their hearts 
full; and their hands not idle. Their eyes 
w^ere open to expect the greatest things, and 
their ears burned with curiosity and zeal to 
know the truth, that the truth might make 
them free. The death-blow which had been 
struck at scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy 
loosened their tongues, and made the talismans 
and love-tokens of Popish superstition, with 
which she had beguiled her followers and com- 
mitted abominations with the people, fall harm- 
less from their necks. 

The translation of the Bible was the chief 
engine in the great work. It threw open, by a 



16 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and 
morality/ which had been there locked up as in 
a shrine. It revealed the visions of the pro- 
phets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired 
teachers (such they were thought) to the meanest 
of the people. It gave them a common interest 
in the common cause. Their hearts burnt within 
them as they read. It gave a mind to the 
people, by giving them common subjects of 
thought and feeling. It cemented their union 
of character and sentiment: it created endless 
diversity and collision of opinion. They found 
objects to employ their faculties, and a motive 
in the magnitude of the consequences attached 
to them, to exert the utmost eagerness in the 
pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity 
in maintaining it. Religious controversy 
sharpens the understanding by the subtlety and 
remoteness of the topics it discusses, and braces 
the will by their infinite importance. We per- 
ceive in the history of this period a nervous 
masculine intellect. No levity, no feebleness, 
no indifference ; or if there w^ere, it is a relaxation 
from the intense activity which gives a tone to 
its general character. But there is a gravity 
approaching to piety ; a seriousness of impres- 
sion, a conscientious severity of argument, an 
habitual fervour and enthusiasm in their mode of 
handling almost every subject. The debates of 
the schoolmen were sharp and subtle enough ; 
but they wanted interest and grandeur, and 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 17 

were, besides, confined to a few : they did not 
affect the general mass of the community. But 
the Bible wa» thrown open to all ranks and con- 
ditions '^to run and read,'' with its wonderful 
table of contents from Genesis to the Reve- 
lations. Every village in England would present 
the scene so well described in Burns's Cotter's 
Saturday Night. I cannot think that all this 
variety and weight of knowledge could be 
thrown in all at once upon the mind of a 
people, and not make some impression upon it, 
the traces of which might be discerned in the 
manners and literature of the age. For, to leave 
more disputable points, and take only the his- 
torical parts of the Old Testament, or the moral 
sentiments of the New, there is nothing like 
them in the power of exciting awe and admi- 
ration, or of rivetting sympathy. We see what 
Milton has made of the account of the Creation, 
from the manner in which he has treated it, im- 
bued and impregnated with the spirit of the 
time of which we speak. Or what is there 
equal (in that romantic interest and patriarchal 
simplicity which goes to the heart of a country, 
and rouses it, as it were, from its lair in wastes 
and wildn esses) to the story of Joseph and his 
Brethren, of Rachael and Laban, of Jacob's 
Dream, of Ruth and Boaz, the descriptions 
in the book of Job, the deliverance of the Jews 
out of Egypt, or the account of their captivity 
and return from Babylon ? There is in all 

c 



18 GENEKAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

these parts of the Scripture, and numberless 
more of the same kind, to pass over the Orphic 
hymns of David, the prophetic denunciations of 
Isaiah, or the gorgeous visions of Ezekiel, an 
originality, a vastness of conception, a depth 
and tenderness of feeling, and a touching sim- 
plicity in the mode of narration, which he who 
does not feel must be made of no ^' penetrablie 
stuff." There is something in the character of 
Christ too (leaving religious faith quite out of 
the question) of more sweetness and majesty, 
and more likely to work a change in the mind 
of man, by the contemplation of its idea alone, 
than any to be found in history, whether actual 
or feigned. This character is that of a sublime 
humanity, such as was never seen on earth 
before nor since. This shone manifestly both 
in his words and actions. We see it in his 
washing the disciples' feet the night before his 
death, that unspeakable instance of humility 
and love, ^^ above all art, all meanness, and all 
pride ;'' and in the leave he took of them on that 
occasion, ^' My peace I give unto you : that 
peace which the world cannot give, give I unto 
you ;" and in his last commandment, that 
"they should love one another." Who can 
read the account of his behaviour on the cross, 
when turning to his mother he said, " Woman, 
behold thy son," and to the disciple John, 
"Behold thy mother," and " from that hour 
that disciple took her to his own home," with- 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 19 

out having his heart smote within him ? We 
see it in his treatment of the woman taken in 
adultery, and in his excuse for the woman who 
poured precious ointment on his garment as an 
offering of devotion and love, which is here all 
in all. His religion was the religion of the 
heart. We see it in his discourse with the dis- 
ciples as they walked together towards Emmaus, 
when their hearts burned within them; in his 
sermon from the Mount, in his parable of the 
good Samaritan, and in that of the Prodigal 
Son — in every act and word of his life, a grace, 
a mildness, a dignity of love, a patience and 
wisdom worthy of the Son of God. His whole 
life and being were imbued, steeped in this 
word, charity ; it was the spring, the well-head 
from which every thought and feeling gushed 
into act ; and it was this that breathed a mild 
glory from his face in that last agony upon the 
cross, '' when the meek Saviour bowed his head 
and died,^' praying for his enemies. He was 
the first true teacher of morality ; for he alone 
conceived the idea of a pure humanity. He 
redeemed man from the worship of that idol, 
self, and instructed him by precept and example 
to love his neighbour as himself, to forgive our 
enemies, to do good to those that curse us and 
despitefuUy use us. He taught the love of good 
for the sake of good, without regard to personal 
or sinister views, and made the affections of the 
heart the sole seat of morality, instead of the 



20 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

pride of the understanding or the sternness of 
the will. In answering the question, " who is 
our neighbour ?" as one who stands in need of 
our assistance, and whose wounds we can bind 
up, he has done more to humanize the thoughts 
and tame the unruly passions, than all who 
have tried to reform and benefit mankind. The 
very idea of abstract benevolence, of the desire 
to do good because another wants our services, 
and of regarding the human race as one family, 
the offspring of one common parent, is hardly 
to be found in any other code or system. It 
was " to the Jews a stumbling block, and to 
the Greeks foolishness." The Greeks and 
Romans never thought of considering others, 
but as they were Greeks or Romans, as they 
were bound to them by certain positive ties, or, 
on the other hand, as separated from them by 
fiercer antipathies. Their virtues w^ere the vir- 
tues of political machines, their vices were the 
vices of demons, ready to inflict or endure pain 
with obdurate and remorseless inflexibility of 
purpose. But in the Christian religion, '^ we 
perceive a softness coming over the heart of a 
nation, and the iron scales that fence and harden 
it, melt and drop off." It becomes malleable, 
capable of pity, of forgiveness, of relaxing in 
its claims, and remitting its power. We strike 
it, and it does not hurt us : it is not steel or 
marble, but flesh and blood, clay tempered with 
tears, and ^^soft as sinews of the new-born 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 21 

babe.'^ The gospel was first preached to the 
poor, for it consulted their wants and interests, 
not its own pride and arrogance. It first pro- 
mulgated the equality of mankind in the com- 
munity of duties and benefits. It denounced 
the iniquities of the chief priests and pharisees 
and declared itself at variance with principalities 
and powers, for it sympathises not with the op- 
pressor, but the oppressed. It first abolished 
slavery, for it did not consider the power of the 
will to inflict injury, as clothing it with a right 
to do so. Its law is good, not power. It at 
the same time tended to wean the mind from 
the grossness of sense, and a particle of its 
divine flame was lent to brighten and purify the 
lamp of love! 

There have been persons who, being sceptics 
as to the divine mission of Christ, have taken 
an unaccountable prejudice to his doctrines, 
and have been disposed to deny the merit of his 
character ; but this was not the feeling of the 
great men in the age of Elizabeth (whatever 
might be their belief), one of whom says of him, 
with a boldness equal to its piety : 

" The best of men 
-That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer ; 
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.'* 

This was old honest Decker, and the lines 
Qught to embalm his memory to every one who 
has a sense either of religion, or philosophy, or 



22 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

humanity, or true genius. Nor can I help 
thinking, that we may discern the traces of the 
influence exerted by religious faith in the spirit 
of the poetry of the age of Elizabeth, in the 
means of exciting terror and pity, in the deli- 
neation of the passions of grief, remorse, love, 
sympathy, the sense of shame, in the fond de- 
sires, the longings after immortality, in the 
heaven of hope, and the abyss of despair it lays 
open before us.* 

The literature of this age, then, I would say, 
was strongly influenced (among other causes), 
first by the spirit of Christianity, and secondly, 
by the spirit of Protestantism* 

The effects of the Reformation on politics and 
philosophy may be seen in the writings and his- 
tory of the next and of the following ages. They 
are still at work, and will continue to be so. 
The effects on the poetry of the time were chiefly 
confined to the moulding of the character, and 
giving a powerful impulse to the intellect of the 
country. The immediate use or application that 
was made of religion to subjects of imagination 
and fiction was not (from an obvious ground of 
separation) so direct or frequent, as that which 
was made of the classical and romantic literature. 

For, much about the same time, the rich and 
fascinating stores of the Greek and Roman my- 

* In some Roman Catholic countries, pictures in part 
supplied the place of the translation of the Bible : and this 
dumb art arose in the silence of the written oracles. 



GENlfRAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 23 

tliology, and those of the romantic poetry of 
Spain and Italy, were eagerly explored by the 
curious, and thrown open in translations to the 
admiring gaze of the vulgar. This last circum- 
stance could hardly have afforded so much ad« 
vantage to the poets of that day, who were 
themselves, in fact, the translators, as it shows 
the general curiosity and increasing interest in 
such subjects, as a prevailing feature of the times. 
There were translations of Tasso by Fairfax, and 
of Ariosto by Harrington, of Homer and Hesiod 
by Chapman, and of Virgil long before, and 
Ovid soon after ; there was Sir Thomas North's 
translation of Plutarch, of which Shakspeare has 
made such admirable use in his Coriolanus and 
Julius Caesar ; and Ben Jonson's tragedies of 
Catiline and Sejanus may themselves be con- 
sidered as almost literal translations into verse, 
of Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero's Orations in his 
consulship, Boccacio, the divine Boccacio, 
Petrarch, Dante, the satirist A retine, Machiavel, 
Castiglione, and others, were familiar to our 
writers, and they make occasional mention of 
some few French authors, as Ronsard and Du 
Bartas ; for the French literature had not at this 
stage arrived at its Augustan period, and it w^as 
the imitation of their literature a century after- 
wards, when it had arrived at its greatest height 
(itself copied from the Greek and Latin), that 
enfeebled and impoverished our own. But of 
the time that we are considering, it might be 



24 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

said, without much extravagance, that every 
breath that blew, every wave that rolled to 
our shores, brought with it some accession to 
our knowledge, which was engrafted on the 
national genius. In fact, all the disposable ma- 
terials that had been accumulating for a long 
period of time, either in our own or in foreign 
countries, were now brought together, and re- 
quired nothing more than to be wrought up, 
polished, or arranged in striking forms, for 
ornament and use. To this every inducement 
prompted; the novelty of the acquisition of 
knowledge in many cases, the emulation of 
foreign wits, and of immortal w^orks, the want 
and the expectation of such works among our- 
selves, the opportunity and encouragement af- 
forded for their production by leisure and 
affluence ; and, above all, the insatiable desire 
of the mind to beget its own image, and to con- 
struct out of itself, and for the delight and ad- 
miration of the world and posterity, that excel- 
lence of which the idea exists hitherto only in its 
own breast, and the impression of which it would 
make as universal as the eye of heaven, the 
benefit as common as the air we breathe. The 
first impulse of genius is to create what never 
existed before: the contemplation of that which 
is so created, is sufficient to satisfy the demands 
of taste ; and it is the habitual study and imita- 
tion of the original models that takes away the 
power, and even wish to do the like. Taste 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 2d 

limps after genius, and from copying the artifi- 
cial models, we lose sight of the living principle 
of nature. It is the effort we make, and the 
impulse we acquire, in overcoming the first ob- 
stacles, that projects us forward ; it is the neces- 
sity for exertion that makes us conscious of 
our strength; but this necessity and this impulse 
once removed, the tide of fancy and enthusiasm, 
which is at first a running stream, soon settles 
and crusts into the standing pool of dulness, 
criticism, and virtu. 

What also gave an unusual impetus to the 
mind of man at this period, was the discovery of 
the Nev/ World, and the reading of voyages and 
travels. Green islands and golden sands seemed 
to arise, as by enchantment, out of the bosom of 
the watery waste, and invite the cupidity, or 
wing the imagination of the dreaming speculator. 
Fairy land was realized in new and unknown 
worlds. " Fortunate fields and groves and 
flowery vales, thrice happy isles, '^ were found 
floating " like those Hesperian gardens famed of 
old,'' beyond Atlantic seas, as dropt from the 
zenith. The people, the soil, the clime, every 
thing gave unlimited scope to the curiosity of 
the traveller and reader. Other manners mio-ht 
be said to enlarge the bounds of knowledge, and 
new mines of wealth were tumbled at our feet. 
It is from a voyage to the Straits of Magellan 
that Shakspeare has taken the hint of Prosperous 
Enchanted Island, and of the savage Caliban 



26 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

with his god Setebos.* Spenser seems to have 
had the same feeling in his mind in the produc- 
tion of his Faery Queen, and vindicates his 
poetic fiction on this very ground of analogy. 

" Right well I wote, most mighty sovereign, 
That all this famous antique history 
Of some the abundance of an idle brain 
Will judged be, and painted forgery, 
Rather than matter of just memory: 
Since none that breatheth living air, doth know 
Where is that happy land of faery 
Which I so much do vaunt, but nowhere show, 
But vouch antiquities which nobody can know. 

But let that man with better sense avise, 
That of the world least part to us is read : 
And daily how through hardy enterprize 
Many great regions are discovered. 
Which to late age were never mentioned. 
Who ever heard of the Indian Peru ? 
Or who in venturous vessel measured 
The Amazons' huge river, now found true ? 
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view ? 

Yet all these were when no man did them know, 
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been : 
And later times things more unknown shall show. 
Why then should witless man so much misween 
That nothing is but that which he hath seen? 
What, if within the moon's fair shining sphere. 
What, if in every other star unseen. 
Of other worlds he happily should hear ? 
He wonder would much more ; yet such to some 
appear. " 

Fancy's air-drawn pictures after history's 
* See a Voyage to the Straits of Magellan, 1594. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 27 

waking dream showed like clouds over moun- 
tains 'j and from tlie romance of real life to the 
idlest fiction, the transition seemed easy. Shak- 
speare, as well as others of his time, availed him- 
self of the old Chronicles, and of the traditions 
or fabulous inventions contained in them in such 
ample measure, and which had not yet been ap- 
propriated to the purposes of poetry or the 
drama. The stage was a new thing ; and those 
who had to supply its demands laid their hands 
upon whatever came within their reach : they 
were not particular as to the means, so that they, 
gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old 
ballad; Othello on an Italian novel ; Hamlet on 
a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition : 
one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammati- 
cus, and the last in HoUingshed. The Ghost- 
scenes and the Witches in each, are authenti- 
cated in the old Gothic history. There was also 
this connecting link between the poetry of this 
age and the supernatural traditions of a former 
one, that the belief in them was still extant, and 
in full force and visible operation among the 
vulgar (to say no more) in the time of our 
authors. The appalling and wild chimeras of 
superstition and ignorance, ^^those bodiless crea- 
tions that ecstacy is very cunning in,'^ were 
inwoven with existing manners and opinions, 
and all their effects on the passions of terror or 
pity might be gathered from common and actual 
observation — might be discerned in the workings 



28 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

of the face, the expressions of the tongue^ the 
writhings of a troubled conscience. ' ' Your face, 
my Thane, is as a book where men may read 
strange matters.'' Midnight and secret murders, 
too, from the imperfect state of the police, were 
more common ; and the ferocious and brutal 
manners that would stamp the brow of the har- 
dened ruffian or hired assassin, more incorrigible 
and undisguised. The portraits of Tyrrel and 
Forrest were, no doubt, done from the life. We 
find that the ravages of the plague, the destruc- 
tive rage of fire, the poisoned chalice, lean 
famine, the serpent's mortal sting, and the fury 
of wild beasts, were the common topics of their 
poetry, as they were common occurrences in 
more remote periods of history. They were the 
strong ingredients thrown into the cauldron 
of tragedy to make it " thick and slab.'' Man's 
life w^as (as it appears to me) more full of traps 
and pit-falls ; of hair-breadth accidents by flood 
and field ; more way -laid by sudden and start- 
ling evils; it trod on the brink of hope and fear; 
stumbled upon fate unawares ; while the imagi- 
nation, close behind it, caught at and clung to 
the shape of danger, or '' snatched a wild and 
fearful joy" from its escape. The accidents 
of nature were less provided against ; the ex^ 
cesses of the passions and of lawless power 
were less regulated^ and produced more strange 
and desperate catastrophes. The tales of Boc- 
cacio are founded on the great pestilence of 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 29 

Florence ; Fletcher the poet died of the plague, 
and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern quarrel. 
The strict authority of parents, the inequality of 
ranks, or the hereditary feuds between different 
families, made more unhappy loves or matches. 
^^*"The course of true love never did run smooth." 
Again, the heroic and martial spirit which 
breathes in our elder writers, was yet in con- 
siderable activity in the reign of Elizabeth. 
'' The age of chivalry was not then quite gone, 
nor the glory of Europe extinguished for ever." 
Jousts and tournaments were still common with 
the nobility in England and in foreign countries. 
Sir Philip Sidney was particularly distinguished 
for his proficiency in these exercises (and in- 
deed fell a martyr to his ambition as a soldier) 
— and the gentle Surrey was still more famous, 
on the same account, just before him. It is true, 
the general use of fire-arms gradually super- 
seded the necessity of skill in the sword, or 
bravery in the person : and we find many symp- 
toms of the rapid degeneracy in this respect. 
It was comparatively an age of peace, 

" Like strength reposing on his own right arm ;" 
but the sound of civil combat might still be 
heard in the distance, the spear glittered to the 
eye of memory, or the clashing of armour struck 
on the imagination of the ardent and the young. 
They were borderers on the savage state, on the 
times of war and bigotry, though in the lap of 



30 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

arts, of luxury, and knowledge. They stood on 
the shore and saw the billows rolling after the 
storm : '' they heard the tumult, and were still." 
The manners and out-of-door amusements were 
more tinctured with a spirit of adventure and 
romance. The war with wild beasts, &c. was 
more strenuously kept up in country sports. I 
do not think we could get from sedentary poets, 
who had never mingled in the vicissitufdes, the 
dangers, or excitements of the chase, such de^ 
scriptions of hunting and other athletic games, 
as are to be found in Shakspeare's Midsummer 
Night's Dream, or Fletcher's Noble Kinsmen. 

With respect to the good cheer and hospitable 
living of those times, I cannot agree with an in- 
genious and agreeable writer of the present day, 
that it was general or frequent. The very stress 
laid upon certain holidays and festivals, shows 
that they did not keep up the same Saturnalian 
licence and open house all the year round. 
They reserved themselves for great occasions, 
and made the best amends they could for a year 
of abstinence and toil by a week of merriment 
and convivial indulgence. Persons in middle 
life at this day, who can afford a good dinner 
every day, do not look forward to it as any par- 
ticular subject of exultation : the poor peasant, 
who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint 
of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event 
in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy 
of the Returne from Parnassus, we find this in- 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 31 

dignant description of the progress of luxury in 
those days, put into the mouth of one of the 
speakers. 

" Why is't not strange to see a ragged clerke, 
Some stammell weaver, or some butcher's sonne, 
That scrubb'd a late within a sleeveless gowne, 
When the commencement, like a morrice dance, 
Hath put a bell or two about his legges, 
Created him a sweet cleane gentleman : 
How then he 'gins to follow fashions. 
He whose thin sire dwelt in a smokye roofe, 
Must take tobacco, and must wear a locke. 
His thirsty dad drinkes in a wooden bowle, 
But his sweet self is served in silver plate. 
His hungry sire will scrape you twenty legges 
For one good Christmas meal on new year's day. 
But his mawe must be capon cramm'd each day." 

Act III, Scene 2. 

This does not look as if in those days ^^it 
snowed of meat and drink/' as a matter of course 
throughout the year! The distinctions of dress, 
the badges of different professions, the very signs 
of the shops, which we have set aside for written 
inscriptions over the doors, were, as Mr Lamb 
observes, a sort of visible lano;uao;e to the imao-i- 
nation, and hints for thought. Like the cos- 
tume of different foreign nations, they had an 
immediate striking and picturesque effect, giving 
scope to the fancy. The surface of society was 
embossed with hieroglyphics, and poetry existed 
^'in act and complement extern. '' The poetry 
of former times might be directly taken from 
real life, as our poetry is taken from the poetry 



32 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

of former times. Finally, the face of nature^ 
which was the same glorious object then that it 
is now, was open to them ; and coming first, they 
gathered her fairest flowers to live for ever in 
their verse — the movements of the hum.an heart 
were not hid from them, for they had the same 
passions as we, only less disguised, and less sub- 
ject to control. Decker has given an admirable 
description of a mad-house in one of his plays. 
But it might be perhaps objected, that it was 
only a literal account taken from Bedlam at that 
time : and it might be answered, that the old 
poets took the same methods of describing the 
passions and fancies of men whom they met at 
large, which forms the point of communion be- 
tween lis ; for the title of the old play, ' A Mad 
World, raj Masters,' is hardly yet obsolete; and 
we are pretty much the same Bedlam still, per- 
haps a little better managed, like the real one, 
and with more care and humanity shown to the 
patients ! 

Lastly, to conclude this account ; what gave 
a unity and common direction to all these causes, 
was the natural genius of the country, which 
w^as strong in these writers in proportion to their 
strength. We are a nation of islanders, and we 
cannot help it; nor mend ourselves if we would. 
We are something in ourselves, nothing when 
we try to ape others. Music and painting are 
not our forte: for what we have done in that way 
has been little, and that borrowed from others 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. J33 

with great difficulty. But we may boast of our 
poets and philosophers. That's something. We 
have had strong heads and sound hearts among 
us. Thrown on one side of the world, and left 
to bustle for ourselves, we have fought out many 
a battle for truth and freedom. That is our na- 
tural style ; and it were to be wished we had in 
no instance departed from it. Our situation has 
given us a certain cast of thought and character; 
and our liberty has enabled us to make the most 
of it. We are of a stiff clay, not moulded into 
every fashion, with stubborn joints not easily 
bent. We are slow to think, and therefore im- 
pressions do not work upon us till they act in 
masses. We are not forward to express our 
feelings, and therefore they do not come from 
us till they force their way in the most impetu- 
ous eloquence. Our language is, as it were, to 
begin anew, and we make useof the most singu- 
lar and boldest combinations to explain ourselves. 
Our wit comes from us, ^^like birdlime, brains 
and all." We pay too little attention to form and 
method, leave our works in an unfinished state, 
but still the materials we work in are solid and 
of nature's mint; we do not deal in counterfeits. 
We both under and over-do, but we keep an eye 
to the prominent features, the main chance. We 
are more for weight than show ; care only about 
what interests ourselves, instead of trying to im- 
pose upon others by plausible appearances, and 
are obstinate and intractable in not conforminu' 



34 GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 

to common rules, by which many arrive at their 
ends with half the real waste of thought and 
trouble. We neglect all but the principal ob- 
ject, gather our force to make a great blow, 
bring it down, and relapse into sluggishness 
and indifference again. Matericum super abat 
opus, cannot be said of us. We may be accused 
of grossness, but not of flimsiness ; of extrava- 
gance, but not of affectation; of want of art and 
refinement, but not of a want of truth and na- 
ture. Our literature, in a word, is Gothic and 
grotesque ; unequal and irregular ; not cast in a 
previous mould, nor of one uniform texture, but 
of great weight in the whole, and of incomparable 
value in the best parts. It aims at an excess of 
beauty or power, hits or misses, and is either 
very good indeed, or absolutely good for nothing. 
This character applies in particular to our litera- 
ture in the age of Elizabeth, which is its best 
period, before the introduction of a rage for 
French rules and French models } for whatever 
may be the value of our own original style of 
composition, there can be neither offence nor 
presumption in saying, that it is at least better 
than our second-hand imitations of others. Our 
understanding (such as it is and must remain, 
to be good for anything) is not a thoroughfare 
for common places, smooth as the palm of one's 
hand, but full of knotty points and jutting 
excrescences, rough, uneven, overgrown with 
brambles ; and I like this aspect of the mind 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 35 

(as some one said of the country), where nature 
keeps a good deal of the soil in her own hands. 
Perhaps the genius of our poetry has more of 
Pan than of Apollo ; ^^ but Pan is a God, Apollo 
is no more ! '^ 



LECTURE 11. 



ON THE DRAMATIC WRITERS CONTEMPORARY 
WITH SHAKSPEARE, LYLY, MARLOWE, HEY- 
WOOD, MIDDLETON, AND ROWLEY. 

The period of which I shall have to treat (from 
the Reformation to the middle of Charles I) 
was prolific in dramatic excellence even more 
than in any other. In approaching it, we seem 
to be approaching the rich strond described in, 
Spenser, where treasures of all kinds lay scat- 
tered, or rather crowded together on the shore 
in inexhaustible but unregarded profusion, "rich 
as the oozy bottom of the deep in sunken wrack 
and sumless treasuries.'' We are confounded 
with the variety, and dazzled with the dusky 
splendour of names sacred in their obscurity, 
and works gorgeous in their decay, " majestic, 
though in ruin," like Giiyon when he entered 
the Cave of Mammon, and was shown the 
massy pillars and huge unwieldy fragments of 
gold, covered with dust and cobwebs, and 
shedding a faint shadow of uncertain light, 

" Such as a lamp whose light doth fade away. 

Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night 

Doth show to him that walks in fear and sad affright." 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 37 

The dramatic literature of this period only 
wants exploring, to fill the inquiring mind with 
wonder and delight^ and to convince us that we 
have been wrong in lavishing all our praise on 
^'new-born gauds, though they are made and 
moulded of things past;" and in ^^ giving to 
dust, that is a little gilt, more laud than gilt 
o'er-dusted/' In short, the discovery of such 
an unsuspected and forgotten mine of wealth 
will be found amply to repay the labour of the 
search, and it will be hard if in most cases 
curiosity does not end in admiration, and mo- 
desty teach US wisdom. A few of the most 
singular productions of these times remain un- 
claimed ; of others the authors are uncertain ; 
many of them are joint productions of different 
pens ; but of the best the writers' names are in 
general known, and obviously stamped on the 
productions themselves. The names of Ben 
Jonson, for instance, Massinger, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, are almost, though not quite, as fa- 
miliar to us, as that of Shakspeare ; and their 
works still keep regular possession of the stage. 
Another set of writers included in the same 
general period (the end of the sixteenth and the 
oeginning of the seventeenth century), who are 
next, or equal, or sometimes superior to these in 
power, but whose names are now little known, 
and their writings nearly obsolete, are Lyly, 
Marlowe, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, and 
Rowley, Hey wood, Webster, Decker, and Ford. 



38 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

I shall devote the present and two following 
Lectures to the best account I can give of these, 
and shall begin with some of the least known. 

The earliest tragedy of which I shall take no- 
tice (I believe the earliest that we have) Is that 
of Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc (as It has 
been generally called), the production of Thomas 
SackvIUe, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards created 
Earl of Dorset, assisted by one Thomas Norton. 
This was first acted with applause before the 
Queen In 1561, the noble author being then 
quite a young man. This tragedy being consi- 
dered as the first In our language, Is certainly 
a curiosity, and In other respects It Is also re- 
markable; though, perhaps, enough has been 
said about It. As a work of genius, It may be 
set down as nothing, for It contains hardly a 
memorable line or passage ; as a work of art, 
and the first of Its kind attempted In the lan- 
guage. It may be-QonsIdered as a monument of 
the taste and skill of the authors. Its merit Is 
confined to the regularity of the plot and metre, 
to Its general good sense, and strict attention to 
common decorum. If the poet has not stamped 
the peculiar genius of his age upon this first at- 
tempt, it is no inconsiderable proof of strength 
of mind and conception sustained by Its own 
sense of propriety alone, to have so far antlci* 
pated the taste of succeeding times as to have 
avoided any glaring offence against rules and 
models, which had no existence in his day. Or 



H'EYWOOD, MIDDLETONj ETC. 39 

perhaps a truer solution might be, that there 
were as yet no examples of a more ambiguous 
and irregular kind to tempt him to err^ and as 
he had not the impulse or resources within him- 
self to strike out a new path, he merely adhered 
with modesty and caution to the classical models 
with which, as a scholar, he was well acquainted. 
The language of the dialogue is clear, unaffected, 
and intelligible without the smallest difficulty, 
even to this day; it has ^^ no figures nor no 
fantasies,'^ to which the most fastidious critic 
can object, but the dramatic power is nearly 
none at all. It is written expressly to set forth 
the dangers and mischiefs that arise from the 
division of sovereign power; and the several 
speakers dilate upon the different views of the 
subject in turn, like clever school-boys set to 
compose a thesis, or declaim upon the fatal con- 
sequences of ambition, and the uncertainty of 
human affairs. The author, in the end, declares 
for the doctrine of passive obedience and non- 
resistance ; a doctrine which indeed was seldom 
questioned at that time of day. Eubulus, one 
of the old king's counsellors, thus gives his 
opinion — 

" Eke fully with the duke my mind agrees. 
That no cause serves, whereby the subject may 
Call to account the doings of his prince ; 
Much less in blood by sword to work revenge : 
No more than may the hand cut off the head. 
In act nor speech, no nor in secret thought, 
The subject may rebel against his lord, 



40 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Or judge of him that sits in Caesar's seat, 
With grudging mind to damn those he mislikes. 
Though kings forget to govern as they ought, 
Yet subjects must obey as they are bound." 

Yet how little he was borne out in this in- 
ference by the unbiassed dictates of his own 
mind, may appear from the freedom and un- 
guarded boldness of such lines as the following, 
addressed by a favourite to a prince, as courtly 
advice. 

" Know ye that lust of kingdoms hath no law : 
The gods do bear and will allow in kings 
The things that they abhor in rascal routs. 
When kings on slender quarrels run to wars. 
And then in cruel and unkindly wise 
Command thefts, rapes, murder of innocents, 
The spoil of towns, ruins of mighty realms ; 
Think you such princes do suppose themselves 
Subject to laws of kind and fear of gods ? 
Murders and violent thefts in private men 
Are heinous crimes, and full of foul reproach ; 
Yet none offence, but deck'd with noble name 
Of glorious conquests in the hands of kings." 

The principal characters make as many invo- 
cations to the names of their children, their 
country, and their friends, as Cicero in his Ora- 
tions, and all the topics insisted upon are open, . 
direct, urged in the face of day, with no more 
attention to time or place, to an enemy who 
overhears, or an accomplice to whom they are 
addressed ; in a word, with no more dramatic 
insinuations or bye-play than the pleadings in a 
court of law. Almost the only passage that I 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 41 

can instance, as rising above this didactic tone 
of mediocrity into the pathos of poetry, is one 
where Marcella laments the untimely death of 
her lover, Ferrex. 

" Ah ! noble prince, how oft have I beheld 
Thee mounted on thy fierce and trampling steed, 
Shining in armour bright before the tilt ; 
And with thy mistress' sleeve tied on thy helm, 
And charge thy staff to please thy lady's eye, 
That bowed the head-piece of thy friendly foe ! 
How oft in arms on horse to bend the mace. 
How oft in arms on foot to break the sword, 
Which never now these eyes may see again !" 

There seems a reference to Chaucer in the 
wording of the following lines — 

" Then saw I how he smiled with slaying knife 
Wrapp'd under cloke, then saw I deep deceit 
Lurk in his face, and death prepared for me."* 

Sir Philip Sidney says of this tragedy : 
" Gorboduc is full of stately speeches, and well- 
sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Se- 
neca his style, and as full of notable morality ; 
which it doth most delightfully teach, and 
thereby obtain the very end of poetry." And Mr 
Pope, whose taste in such matters was very 
different from Sir Philip Sidney's, says in still 
stronger terms : " That the writers of the suc- 
ceeding age might have improved as much in 
other respects, by copying from him a propriety 

* " The smiler with the knife under his cloke." 

KnigMs Tale. 



42 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

in the sentiments, an unaffected perspicuity of 
style, and an easy flow in the numbers. In a 
word, that chastity, correctness, and gravity of 
style, which are so essential to tragedy, and 
which all the tragic poets who followed, not ex- 
cepting Shakspeare himself, either little under- 
stood, or perpetually neglected.'^ It was well 
for us and them that they did so ! 

The Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates 
does his muse more credit. It sometimes re- 
minds one of Chaucer, and at others seems like 
an anticipation, in some degree, both of the 
measure and manner of Spenser. The following 
stanzas may give the reader an idea of the merit 
of this old poem, which was published in 1563. 

" By him lay heauie Sleepe cosin of Death 
Flat on the ground, and still as any stone, 
A very corps, sane yeelding forth a breath. 
Small keepe tooke he whom Fortune frowned on, 
Or whom she lifted vp into the throne 
Of high renowne, but as a lining death, 
So dead aliue, of life he drew the breath. 

The bodies rest, the quiet of the hart, 
The trauiles ease, the still nights feere was he. 
And of our life in earth the better part, 
Reuer of sight, and in whom we see 
Things oft that tide, and oft that neuer bee. 
Without respect esteeming equally 
King Croesus pompe, and Irus pouertie. 

And next in order sad Old Age we found. 
His beard all hoare, his eyes hollow and blind, 
With drouping cheerc still poring on the ground. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 43 

As on the place where nature him assign'd 
To rest, when that the sisters had vntwin'd 
His vitall thred, and ended with their knife 
The fleeting course of fast dechning life. 

There heard we him with broke and hollow plaint 
Rew with himselfe his end approaching fast, 
And all for nought his wretched mind torment, 
With sweete remembrance of his pleasures past, 
And fresh delites of lustie youth forewast. 

Recounting which, how would he sob and shreek ? 

And to be young againe of loue beseeke. 

But and the cruell fates so fixed be. 
That time forepast cannot returne againe. 
This one request of loue yet prayed he: 
That in such withred plight, and wretched paine. 
As Eld (accompanied with lothsome traine) 
Had brought on him, all were it woe and griefe. 
He might a while yet linger forth his life. 

And not so soone descend into the pit : 

Where Death, when he the mortall corps hath slaine, 

With wretchlesse hand in graue doth couer it. 

Thereafter neuer to enioy againe 

The gladsome light, but in the ground ylaine, 

In depth of darknesse waste and weare to nought. 
As he had nere into the world been brought. 

But who had scene him, sobbing how he stood 
Vnto himselfe, and how he would bemone 
His youth forepast, as though it wrought him good 
To talk of youth, all were his youth foregone, 
He would haue mused and maruail'd much whereon 
This wretched Age should life desire so faine, 
And knowes ful wel life doth but length his paine. 

Crookebackt he was, toothshaken, and blere eyed, 
Went on three feete, and sometime crept on fourc. 



44 ON LYLYj MARLOWE, 

With old lame bones, that ratled by his side, 
His scalpe all pil'd, and he with eld forelore : 
His withred fist still knocking at Death's dore, 
Fumbling and driueling as he draws his breath, 
For briefe, the shape and messenger of Death," 

John Lyly (born in the Weald of Kent 
about the year 1553), was the author of Midas 
and Endymion, of Alexander and Campaspe, 
and of the comedy of Mother Bombie. Of 
the last it may be said, that it is very much 
what its name would import, old, quaint, and 
vulgar. — I may here observe, once for all, that 
I would not be understood to say, that the age 
of Elizabeth was all of gold without any alloy. 
There was both gold and lead in it, and often 
in one and the same writer. In our impatience 
to form an opinion, we conclude, when we first 
meet with a good thing, that it is owing to the 
age ; or, if we meet with a bad one, it is char- 
acteristic of the age, when, in fact, it is neither ; 
for there are good and bad in almost all ages, 
and one age excels in one thing, another in 
another — only one age may excel more and in 
higher things than another, but none can excel 
equally and completely in all. The writers of 
Elizabeth, as poets, soared to the height they 
did by indulging their own unrestrained enthu- 
siasm ; as comic writers they chiefly copied the 
manners of the age, which did not give them 
the same advantages over their successors. 
Lyly's comedy, for instance, is " poor, un- 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETOX, ETC. 4o 

fledged, has never winged from view o' th' 
nest/' and tries in vain to rise above the ground 
with crude conceits and clumsy levity. Lydia, 
the heroine of the piece, is silly enough, if the 
rest were but as witty. But the author has 
shewn no partiality in the distribution of his 
gifts. To say the truth, it was a very common 
fault of the old comedy, that its humours were 
too low, and the weaknesses exposed too great 
to be credible, or an object of ridicule, even ii 
they were. The affectation of their corn-tiers 
is passable, and diverting as a contrast to pre- 
sent manners ; but the eccentricities of their 
clowns are *^ very tolerable, and not to be 
endured." Any kind of activity of mind 
might seem to the writers better than none : any 
nonsense served to amuse their hearers ; any 
cant phrase, any coarse allusion, any pompous 
absurdity, was taken for wit and drollery. 
Nothing could be too mean^ too foolish, too 
improbable, or too offensive, to be a proper 
subject for laughter. Any one (looking hastily 
at this side of the question only) might be 
tempted to suppose the youngest children of 
Thespis a very callow brood, chirping their 
slender notes, or silly swains '' o^ratino; their 
lean and flashy jests on scrannel pipes of 
wretched straw.'' The genius of comedy looked 
too often like a lean and hectic pantaloon ; 
love was a slip-shod shepherdess ; wit a parti- 
coloured fool like harlequin, and the plot came 



46 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

hobbling like a clown after all. A string of 
impertinent and farcical jests (or rattier blun- 
ders), was with great formality ushered into 
the world as ^^ a right pleasant and conceited 
comedy." Comedy could not descend lower 
than it sometimes did, without glancing at 
physical imperfections and deformity. The 
two young persons in the play before us, on 
whom the event of the plot chiefly hinges, do 
in fact^urn out to be no better than changelings 
and natural idiots. This is carrying innocence 
and simplicity too far. So again, the character 
of Sir Tophas in Endymion, an affected, 
blustering, talkative, cowardly pretender, treads 
too near upon blank stupidity and downright 
want of common sense to be admissible as a 
butt for satire. Shakspeare has contrived to 
clothe the lamentable nakedness of the same 
sort of character with a motley garb from the 
wardrobe of his imagination, and has redeemed 
it from insipidity by a certain plausibility of 
speech and playful extravagance of humour. 
But the undertaking was nearly desperate. 
Ben Jonson tried to overcome the difliculty 
by the force of learning and study ; and thought 
to gain his end by persisting in error ; but he 
only made matters worse, for his clow^ns and 
coxcombs (if we except Bobadil) are the most 
incorrigible and insufferable of all others. — The 
story of Mother Bomdie is little else than a 
tissue of absurd mistakes, arising from the 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 47 

confusion of the different characters one with 
another, like another Comedy of Errors, and 
ends in their being (most of them) married in 
a game at cross-purposes to the persons they 
particularly dislike. 

To leave this, and proceed to something 
pleasanter, Midas and Endymion, which are 
worthy of their names and of the subject. The 
story in both is classical, and the execution is 
for the most part elegant and simple. There is 
often something that reminds one of the 
graceful communicativeness of Lucian or of 
Apuleius, from whom one of the stories is 
borrowed. jLyly made a more attractive pic- 
ture of Grecian manners at second-hand, than 
of English characters from his own observa- 
tion. The poet (which is the great merit of a 
poet in such a subject) has transported himself 
to the scene of action, to ancient Greece or 
Asia Minor ; the manners, the images, the 
traditions are preserved with truth and delicacy, 
and the dialogue (to my fancy) glides and 
sparkles like a clear stream from the Muses' 
spring. I know few things more perfect in 
characteristic painting, than the exclamation of 
the Phrygian shepherds, who, afraid of betray- 
ing the secret of Midas's ears, fancy that ^'the 
very reeds bow down, as though they listened 
to their talk ;" nor more affecting in sentiment 
than the apostrophe addressed by his friend 
Eumenides to Endymion, on waking from his 



48 ON LYLYj MAPtLOWE, 

long sleep. ^^ Behold the twig to which thou 
laidest down thy head, is now become a tree." 
The narrative is sometimes a little wandering 
and desultory ; but if it had been ten times as 
tedious, this thought would have redeemed it ; 
for I cannot conceive of anything more beauti- 
ful, more simple, or touching, than this exqui- 
sitely chosen image and dumb proof of the 
manner in which he passed his life, from 
youth to old age, in a dream, a dream of 
love. Happy Endymion ! Faithful Eumenides ! 
Divine Cynthia ! Who would not wish to pass 
his life in such a sleep, a long, long sleep, 
dreaming of some fair heavenly Goddess, with 
the moon shining upon his face and the trees 
growing silently over his head ! — There is some- 
thing in this story which has taken a strange 
hold of my fancy, perhaps ^^out of my weak- 
ness and my melancholy ;" but for the satisfac- 
tion of the reader I will quote the whole pas- 
sage : — "it is silly sooth, and dallies with the 
innocence of love like the old age." 

" Cynthia. Well, let us to Endymion. I will not be so 
stately (good Endymion) not to stoop to do thee good ; 
and if thy liberty consist in a kiss from me, thou shalt have 
it. And although my mouth hath been heretofore as un- 
touched as my thoughts, yet now to recover thy life 
(though to restore thy youth it be impossible) I will do 
that to Endymion which yet never mortal man could 
boast of heretofore, nor shall ever hope for hereafter. ( She 
hisses him.) 

Eumenides. Madam, he beginneth to stir. 



HiSYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 49 

Cynthia, Soft, Eumenides, stand still. 

Eumenides. Ah ! I see his eyes almost open. 

Cynthia. I command thee once again, stir not -. I will 
stand behind him. 

Panelion. What do I see ? Endymion almost awake ? 

Eumenides. Endymion, Endymion, art thou deaf or 
dumb ? Or hath this long sleep taken away thy memory ? 
Ah ! my sweet Endymion, seest thou not Eumenides, thy 
faithful friend ; thy faithful Eumenides, who for thy sake 
hath been careless of his own content ? Speak, Endymion ! 
Endymion ! Endymion ! 

Endymion, Endymion ! I call to mind such a name. 

Eumenides. Hast Jthou forgotten^ thyself, Endymion ? 
Then do I not marvel thou rememberest not thy friend. 
I tell thee thou art Endymion, and I Eumenides. Behold 
also, Cynthia, by whose favour thou art awaked, and by 
whose virtue thou shalt continue thy natural course. 

Cynthia. Endymion ! Speak, sweet Endymion ! knowest 
thou not Cynthia ? 

Endymion. Oh heavens ! whom do I behold ? Fair Cyn- 
thia, divine Cynthia? 

Cynthia. I am Cynthia, and thou Endymion. 

Endymion. Endymion ! What do I hear -^ What ! a 
grey beard, hollow eyes, withered body, decayed limbs, 
and all in one night? 

Eumenides. One night I Thou hast slept here forty 
years, by what enchantress, as yet it is not known : and 
behold the twig to which thou laidest thy head, is now 
become a tree. Callest thou not Eumenides to remem- 
brance ? 

Endymion, Thy name I do remember by the sound, 
but thy favour I do not yet call to mind : only divine 
Cynthia, to w^hom time, fortune, death, and destiny are 
subject, I see and remember ; and in all humility, I regard 
and reverence. 

Cynthia. You shall have good cause to remember 

E 



50 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Eumenides, who hath for thy safety forsaken his own 
solace. 

Endymion. Am I that Endymion, who was wont in 
court to lead my life, and in justs, tourneys, and arms, to 
exercise my youth ? Am 1 that Endymion ? 

Eumenides. Thou art that Endymion, and I Eumenides : 
wilt thou not yet call me to remembrance ? 

Endymion, Ah ! sweet Eumenides, I now perceive thou 
art he, and that myself have the name of Endymion ; but 
that this should be my body, I doubt : for how could my 
curled locks be turned to grey hair, and my strong body 
to a dying weakness, having waxed old, and not knowing it. 

Cynthia. Well, Endymion, arise : awhile sit down, for 
that thy limbs are stiff and not able to stay thee, and tell 
what thou hast seen in thy sleep all this while. What 
dreams, visions, thoughts, and fortunes : for it is impossible 
but in so long a time thou shouldst see strange things." 

Act V. Scene 1. 

It does not take away from the pathos of 
this poetical allegory on the chances of love and 
the progress of human life, that it may be sup- 
posed to glance indirectly at the conduct of 
Queen Elizabeth to our author, who after four- 
teen years' expectation of the place of Master of 
the Revels, was at last disappointed. This 
princess took no small delight in keeping her 
poets in a sort of Fool's Paradise. The wit of 
Lyly, in parts of this romantic drama, seems to 
have grown spirited and classical with his sub- 
ject. He puts this fine hyperbolical irony in 
praise of Dipsas, (a most unamiable personage, 
as it will appear), into the mouth of Sir Tophas : 

" Oh, what fine thin hair hath Dipsas ! What a pretty 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 51 

low forehead ! What a tall and stately nose ! What little 
hollow eyes 1 What great and goodly lips ! How harmless 
is she, being toothless ! Her fingers fat and short, adorned 
with long nails like a bittern ! What a low stature she is, 
and yet what a great foot she carrieth ! How thrifty must 
she be, in whom there is no waist ; how virtuous she is 
like to be over whom no man can be jealous !" 

Act III. Scene 3. 

It is singular that the style of this author, 
which is extremely sweet and flowing, should 
have been the butt of ridicule to his contempo- 
raries, particularly Drayton, who compliments 
Sydney as the author that 

" Did first reduce 
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use ; 
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, 
Playing with words and idle similes, 
As the English apes and very zanies be 
Of every thing that they do hear and see." 

Which must apply to the prose style of his 
work, called ' Euphues and his England,' and 
is much more like Sir Philip Sydney's own 
manner, than the dramatic style of our poet. 
Besides the passages above quoted, I might refer 
to the opening speeches of Midas, and again 
to the admirable contention between Pan and 
Apollo for the palm of music. — His Alexander 
and Campaspe is another sufhcient answer to 
the charge. This play is a very pleasing tran- 
script of old manners and sentiment. It is full 
of sweetness and point, of Attic salt and the ho- 
ney of Hymettus. The following song given 



52 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

to Apelles, would not disgrace the mouth of 
the prince of painters : 

" Cupid and my Campaspe play'd 
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid ; 
He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows ; 
His mother's doves and team of sparrows ; 
Loses them too, then down he throws 
The coral of his lip, the rose 
Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how) 
With these the crystal of his brow, 
And then the dimple of his chin ; 
All these did my Campaspe win. 
At last he set her both his eyes, 
She won, and Cupid blind did rise. 
O, Love ! has she done this to thee? 
What shall, alas ! become of me ? " 

The conclusion of this drama is as follows. 
Alexander addressing himself to Apelles, says, 

" Well, enjoy one another : I give her thee frankly, 
Apelles. Thou shalt see that Alexander maketh but a 
toy of love, and leadeth affection in fetters : using fancy 
as a fool to make him sport, or a minstrel to make him 
merry. It is not the amorous glance of an eye can settle 
an idle thought in the heart ; no, no, it is children's game, 
a life for sempsters and scholars ; the one, pricking in 
clouts, have nothing else to think on ; the other picking 
fancies out of books, have little else to marvel at. Go, 
Apelles, take with you your Campaspe ; Alexander is 
cloyed with looking on at that, which thou wonderest at. 

Apelles, Thanks to your Majesty on bended knee ; you 
have honoured Apelles. 

Campaspe. Thanks with bowed heart ; you have blessed 
Campaspe. [Exeunt. 

Alexander. Page, go warn Clytus and Parmenia, and 
the other lords to be in readiness ; let the trumpet sound, 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 53 

strike up the drum, and I will presently into Persia. How 
now, Hephistion, is Alexander able to resist love as he list? 

Hepkistion. The conquering of Thebes was not so ho- 
nourable as the subduing of these thoughts. 

Alexander. It were a shame Alexander should desire to 
command the world, if he could not command himself. 
But come, let us go. And, good Hephistion, when all the 
world is won, and every country is thine and mine, either 
find me out another to subdue, or on my word, I will fall 
in love. '* 

Marlowe is a name that stands high, and al- 
most first in this list of dramatic worthies. He 
was a little before Shakspeare's time*, and has a 
marked character both from him and the rest. 
There is a lust of power in his writings, a hun- 
ger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of 
the imagination, unhallowed by any thing but 
its own energies. His thoughts burn within 
liim like a furnace with bickering flames: or 
throwing out black smoke and mists, that hide 
the dawn of genius, or like a poisonous mineral, 
corrode the heart. His ' Life and Death of 
Doctor Faustus,^ though an imperfect and un- 
equal performance, is his greatest work. Faus- 
tus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic 
one. This character may be considered as a 
personification of the pride of will and eagerness 
of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear 
and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it 
were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge 
his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature 
and art, and to extend his power with his 
* He died about 1594. 



54 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

knowledge. He would realise all the fictions 
of a lawless imagination, would solve the most 
subtle speculations of abstract reason ; and for 
this purpose sets at defiance all mortal conse- 
quences, and leagues himself wuth demoniacal 
power, with '' fate and metaphysical aid." 
The idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once 
the dread of the vulgar and the darling of the 
visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in 
the restless tendency of the human mind, to 
conceive of and aspire to more than it can 
achieve by natural means, and in the obscure 
apprehension that the gratification of this extra- 
vagant and unauthorised desire, can only be 
attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary 
hopes and better prospects, to the infernal 
agents that lend themselves to its accomplish- 
ment. Such is the foundation of the present 
story. Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at 
once and for a moment, for a few short years, 
all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is 
willing to give in exchange his soul and body 
to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he 
fancies, becomes by this means present to his 
sense : whatever he commands, is done. He 
calls back time past, and anticipates the future : 
the visions of antiquity pass before him, Baby- 
lon in all its glory, Paris and CEnone : all the 
projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet 
pay tribute at his feet : all the delights of for- 
tune, of ambition, of pleasure, and of learning 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON5 ETC. 55 

are centered in his person ; and from a short- 
lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken 
power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and 
perdition. This is the alternative to which he 
submits^ the bond which he signs with his 
blood! As the outline of the character is 
grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and 
fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular ; 
and the style halts and staggers under them, 
^^ with uneasy steps ;" — " such footing found 
the sole of unblest feet." There is a little fus- 
tian and incongruity of metaphor now and then, 
which is not very injurious to the subject. It 
is time to give a few passages in illustration of 
this account. He thus opens his mind at the 
beginning : 

" How am I glutted with conceit of this ! 
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please ? 
Resolve me of all ambiguities ? 
Perform what desperate enterprise I will ? 
I'll have them fly to India for gold, 
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, 
And search all corners of the new-found world 
For pleasant fruits and princely delicate s. 
I'll have them read me strange philosophy, 
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings : 
I'll have them wall all Germany w^th brass. 
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg ; 
I'll have them fill the public schools with skill, 
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad ; 
I'll le\7^ soldiers with the coin they bring, 
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, 
And reign sole king of all the provinces : 



56 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war 
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp bridge, 
I'll make my servile spirits to invent. 

Enter Valdes and Cornelius. 
Come, German Valdes and Cornelius, 
And make me blest with your sage conference, 
Valdes, sweet Valdes, and Cornelius, 
Know that your words have won me at the last 
To practise magic and concealed arts. 
Philosophy is odious and obscure ; 
Both Law and Physic are for petty wits ; 
'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravish'd me. 
Then, gentle friends, aid me in this attempt ; 
And I, that have with subtile syllogisms 
Gravell'd the pastors of the German church, 
And made the flow'ring pride of Wittenberg 
Swarm to my problems, as th' infernal spirits 
On sweet Musseus when he came to hell ; 
Will be as cunning as Agrippa was. 
Whose shadow made all Europe honour him. 

Valdes. These books, thy wit, and our experience 
Shall make all nations to canonize us. 
As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords. 
So shall the spirits of every element 
Be always serviceable to us three. 
Like lions shall they guard us when we please ; 
Like Almain Rutters with their horseman's staves. 
Or Lapland giants trotting by our sides : 
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids. 
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows 
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love. 
From Venice they shall drag whole argosies, 
And from America the golden fleece. 
That yearly stuffs old Philip's treasury • ; 
If learned Faustus will be resolute. 

» An anachronism. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 57 

Faustus. As resolute am I in this 

As thou to live, therefore object it not." 

In his colloquy with the fallen angel, he 
shews the fixedness of his determination : — 
" What ! is great Mephostophilis so passionate 
For being deprived of the joys of heaven ? 
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, 
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." 

Yet we afterwards find him faltering in his 
resolution, and struggling with the extremity of 
his fate. 

" My heart is harden'd, I cannot repent : 
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven ; 
Swords, poisons, halters, and envenom'd steel 
Are laid before me to dispatch myself; 
And long ere this I should have done the deed, 
Had not sv^eet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. 
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me 
Of Alexander's love and (Enon's death ? 
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes 
With ravishing sounds of his melodious harp, 
Made music with my Mephostophilis ? 
Why should I die then or basely despair ? 
I am resolv'd, Faustus shall not repent. 
Come, Mephostophilis, let us dispute again, 
And reason of divine astrology." 

There is one passage more of this kind, 
which is so striking and beautiful, so like a 
rapturous and deeply passionate dream, that I 
cannot help quoting it here : it is the address to 
the Apparition of Helen. 

Enter Helen again, passing over between two Cupids. 
Faustus. Was this the face that launch'd a thou- 
sand ships, 



58 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

And burnt the topless tow'rs of Ilium ? 

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 

Her lips suck forth my soul ! See where it flies. 

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 

Here will I dwell, for Heav'n is in these lips, 

And all is dross that is not Helena. 

I will be Paris, and for love of thee, 

Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sack'd ; 

And I will combat with weak Menelaus, 

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest ; 

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, 

And then return to Helen for a kiss. 

— Oh ! thou art fairer than the evening air. 

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars : 

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, 

When he appeared to hapless Semele ; 

More lovely than the monarch of the sky 

In wanton Arethusa's azure arms ; 

And none but thou shalt be my paramour." 

The ending of the play is terrible, and his 
last exclamations betray an anguish of mind 
and vehemence of passion, not to be contem- 
plated without shuddering. 

— " Oh, Faustus ! 

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, 

And then thou must be damn'd perpetually. 

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heav'n, 

That time may cease, and midnight never come. 

Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make 

Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but a year, 

A month, a week, a natural day. 

That Faustus may repent, and save his soul. 

{The Clock strikes Twelve.) 
It strikes ! it strikes ! Now, body, turn to air, 
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETOX, ETC. 59 

Oh soul ! be chang'd into small water-drops, 
And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found. 

( Thunder, Enter the Devils. ) 
Oh ! mercy, Heav'n ! Look not so fierce on me ! 
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile ! — 
Ugly hell, gape not ! Come not, Lucifer ! 
I'll burn my books ! Oh ! Mephostophilis." 

Perhaps the finest trait in the whole play, 
and that which softens and subdues the horror 
of it, is the interest taken by the tv/o scholars 
in the fate of tlieir master, and their unavailing 
attempts to dissuade him from his relentless 
career. The regard to learning is the ruling 
passion of this drama, and its indications are 
as mild and amiable in them as its ungoverned 
pursuit has been fatal to Faustus. 

" Yet, for he was a scholar once admir'd 
For wondrous knowledge in our German schools. 
We'll give his mangled limbs due burial ; 
And all the students, clothed in mourning black, 
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." 

So the Chorus : 

" Cut is the branch that might have grown full 
strait, 
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough. 
That sometime grew within this learned man." 

And still more affecting are his own conflicts 
of mind and agonizing doubts on this subject 
just before, when he exclaims to his friends ; 
'' Oh, gentlemen ! Hear me with patience, 
and tremble not at my speeches. Though my 
heart pant and quiver to remember that I have 



60 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

been a student here these thirty years ; oh ! 
would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read 
book ! '^ A finer compliment was never paid, 
nor a finer lesson ever read to the pride of 
learning. The intermediate comic parts, in 
which Faustus is not directly concerned, are 
mean and grovelling to the last degree. One 
of the Clowns says to another, ^' Snails ! what 
hast got there ? A book ? Why thou can'st 
not tell ne'er a word on't." Indeed, the igno- 
rance and barbarism of the time, as here 
described, might almost justify Faustus's over- 
strained admiration of learning, and turn the 
heads of those who possessed it from novelty 
and unaccustomed excitement, as the Indians 
are made drunk with wine ! Goethe, the Ger- 
man poet, has written a drama on this tradition 
of his country, which is considered a master- 
piece. I cannot find in Marlowe's play, any 
proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to 
him, unless the belief in witchcraft and the 
Devil can be regarded as such; and at the 
time he wrote, not to have believed in both 
would have been construed into the rankest 
atheism and irreligion. There is a delight, as 
Mr Lamb says, "in dallying with interdicted 
subjects ; " but that does not, by any means, 
imply either a practical or speculative disbelief 
of them. 

' Lust's Dominion ; or, The Lascivious 
Queen,' is referable to the same general style 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 61 

of writing ; and is a striking picture, or rather 
caricature of the unrestrained love of power, 
not as connected with learning, but with regal 
ambition and external sway. There is a good 
deal of the same intense passion, the same 
recklessness of purpose, the same smouldering 
fire within ; but there is not any of the same 
relief to the mind in the lofty imaginative 
nature of the subject, and the continual repeti- 
tion of plain practical villainy and undigested 
horrors disgusts the sense and blunts the in- 
terest. The mind is hardened into obduracy, 
not melted into sympathy, by such barefaced 
and barbarous cruelty. Eleazar, the Moor, is 
such another character as Aaron in ' Titus An- 
dronicus ; ' and this play might be set down with- 
out injustice as '' pew- fellow'^ to that. I should 
think Marlowe has a much fairer claim to be 
the author of ' Titus Andronicus ' than Shaks- 
peare, at least from internal evidence ; and the 
argument of Schlegel, that it must have been 
Shakspeare's, because there was no one else 
capable of producing either its faults or beau- 
ties, fails in each particular. The Queen is the 
same character in both these plays, and the 
business of the plot is carried on in much the 
same revolting manner, by making the nearest 
friends and relatives of the wretched victims 
the instruments of their sufferings and persecu- 
tion by an arch- villain. To show, however, 
that the same strong-braced tone of passionate 



62 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

declamation is kept up, take the speech of 
Eleazer on refusing the proffered crown. 

*' What, do none rise ? 
No, no, for kings indeed are deities. 
And who'd not (as the sun) in brightness shine? 
To be the greatest is to be divine. 
^Vho among millions would not be the mightiest ? 
To sit in godlike state ; to have all eyes 
Dazzled with admiration, and all tongues 
Shouting loud prayers ; to rob every heart 
Of love ; to have the strength of every arm ; 
A sovereign's name, why 'tis a sovereign charm. 
This glory round about me hath thrown beams : 
I have stood upon the top of fortune's wheel. 
And backwards turned the iron screw of fate. 
The destinies have spun a silken thread 
About my life ; yet thus I cast aside 
The shape of Majesty, and on my knee 
To this Imperial state lowly resign 
This usurpation ; wiping off your fears 
Which struck so hard upon me." 

This is enough to show the unabated vigour 
of the author's style. This strain is certainly 
doing justice to the pride of ambition, and the 
imputed majesty of kings. 

We have heard much of '' Marlowe^s mighty 
line/' and this play furnishes frequent instances 
of it. There are a number of single lines that 
seem struck out in the heat of a glowing fancy, 
and leave a track of golden fire behind them. 
The following are a few that might be given. 

" I know he is not dead ; I know proud death 
Durst not behold such sacred majesty." 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 63 

" Hang both your greedy ears upon my lips, 
Let them devour my speech, suck in my breath." 



" From discontent grows treason, 

And on the stalk of treason death." 

***** 

" Tyrants swim safest in a crimson flood." 

***** 

The two following lines — 

" Oh ! I grow dull, and the cold hand of sleep 
Hath thrust his icy fingers in my breast" — 

are the same as those in King John — 

" And none of you will bid the winter come 
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw." 

And again the Moor's exclamation, 

" Now by the proud complexion of my cheeks, 
Ta'en from the kisses of the amorous sun" — 

is the same as Cleopatra's — 

" But I that am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black," &c. 

Eleazar's sarcasm, 

" These dignities, 

Like poison, make men swell ; this rat's-bane honour, 
Oh, 'tis so sweet ! they'll lick it till they burst" — 

shews the utmost virulence of smothered spleen ; 
and his concluding strain of malignant exultation 
has been but tamely imitated by Young's 
Zanga. 

" Now, tragedy, thou minion of the night, 
Rhamnusia's pew-fellow*, to thee I'll sing, 

* This expression seems to be ridiculed by Falstaff. 



64 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Upon a harp made of dead Spanish bones, 
The proudest instrument the world affords : 
To thee that never blushest, though thy cheeks 
Are full of blood, O Saint Revenge, to thee 
I consecrate my murders, all my stabs," &c. 

It may be worth while to observe, for the 
sake of the curious, that many of Marlowe's 
most sounding lines consist of monosyllables, or 
nearly so. The repetition of Eleazer's taunt to 
the Cardinal, retorting his own words upon 
him, " Spaniard or Moor, the saucy slave shall 
die" — may perhaps have suggested Falcon- 
bridge's spirited reiteration of the phrase — 
"And hang a calf's skin on those recreant 
limbs." 

I do not think ' The Rich Jew of Malta' so 
characteristic a specimen of this writer's powers. 
It has not the same fierce glow of passion or 
expression. It is extreme in act, and outrage- 
ous in plot and catastrophe ; but it has not the 
same vigorous filling up. The author seems 
to have relied on the horror inspired by the 
subject, and the national disgust excited against 
the principal character, to rouse the feelings of 
the audience : for the rest, it is a tissue of gra- 
tuitous, unprovoked, and incredible atrocities, 
which are committed, one upon the back of 
the other, by the parties concerned, without 
motive, passion or object. There are, not- 
withstanding, some striking passages in it, 
as Barabbas's description of the bravo, Philia 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 05 

Borzo* ; the relation of his own unaccountable 
villanies to Ithamore ; his rejoicing over his re- 
covered jewels " as the morning lark sings over 
her young ;" and the backwardness he declares 
iv himself to forgive the Christian injuries that 
are offered him,f which may have given the 

* " He sent a shaggy, tattered, staring slave, 

That when he speaks draws out his grisly beard, 

And winds it twice or thrice about his ear ; 

Whose face has been a grind-stone for men's swords : 

His hands are hack'd, some fingers cut quite off, 

Who when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks 

Like one that is employed in catzerie, 

And cross-biting ; such a rogue 

As is the husband to a hundred whores ; 

And I by him must send three hundred crowns.'' 

Act IV. 
t " In spite of these swine-eating Christians 

(Unchosen nation, never circumcised ; 

Such poor villains as were ne'er thought upon, 

Till Titus and Vespasian conquer 'd us) 

Am I become as wealthy as I am. 

They hoped my daughter would have been a nun ; 

But she's at home, and I have bought a house 

As great and fair as is the Governor's : 

And there, in spite of Malta, will I dwell. 

Having Ferneze's hand ; whose heart I'll have, 

Ay, and his son's top, or it shall go hard. 

" I am not of the tribe of Levi, I, 
That can so soon forget an injury. 
We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we pleaSe ; 
And when we grin we bite ; yet are our looks 
As innocent and harmless as a lamb's. 
I learn'd in Florence how to kiss my hand, 

F 



66 ON LYLY, MABLOWE, 

idea of one of Shyloek's speeches, where he 
h'onically disclaims any enmity to the merchants 
on the same account. It is perhaps hardly fair 
to compare the Jew of Malta with the Mer- 
chant of Venice ; for it is evident that Shak- 
speare's genius shows to as much advantage in 
knowledge of character, in variety, and stage- 
effect, as it does in point of general humanity. 

Edward II is, according to the modern stan- 
dard of composition, Marlowe's best play. It is 
written with few ofiences against the common 
rules, and in a succession of smooth and flowing 
lines. The poet however succeeds less in the 
voluptuous and effeminate descriptions which he 
here attempts, than in the more dreadful and 
violent bursts of passion. Edward II is drawn 
with historic truth, but without much dramatic 
effect. The management of the plot is feeble and 
desultory ; little interest is excited in the various 
turns of fate; the characters are too worthless, 
have too little energy, and their punishment is, 
in general, too well deserved to excite our com- 
miseration ; so that this play will bear, on the 
whole, but a distant comparison with Shak- 
speare's Richard II in conduct, power, or effect. 

Heave up my shoulders when they call me do^, 
And duck as low as any bare-foot Friar : 
Hoping to see them starve upon a stall, 
Or else be gather'd for in our synagogue, 
That when the offering bason comes to me, 
Even for charity I may spit into it." 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 67 

But the death of Edward II, in Marlowe's tra- 
gedy, is certainly superior to that of Shakspeare's 
King ; and in heart-breaking distress, and the 
sense of human weakness, claiming pity from 
utter helplessness and conscious misery, is not 
surpassed by any writer whatever. 

*' Edward. Weep'st thou already ? List awhile to me. 
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is, 
Or as Matrevis, hewn from the Caucasus, 
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale. 
This dungeon where they keep me, is the sink 
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls. , 

Lightborn. Oh villains. 

Edward. And here in mire and puddle have I stood 
This ten days' space ; and lest that I should sleep. 
One plays continually upon a drum. 
They give me bread and water, being a king ; 
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance, 
My mind's distemper'd, and my body's numb'd : 
And whether I have limbs or no, I know, not. 
Oh ! would my blood drop out from every vein, 
As doth this water from my tatter'd robes ! 
Tell Isabel, the Queen, I look'd not thus, 
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
And there unhors'd the Duke of Cleremont." 

There are some excellent passages scattered 
up and down. The description of the King and 
Gaveston looking out of the palace window^, and 
laughing at the courtiers as they pass, and that 
of the different spirit shown by the lion and the 
forest deer, when wounded, are among the best. 
The song " Come live with me and be my love," 



68 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

. to which sir Walter Raleigh wrote an answer, 
is Marlowe's. 

Heywood I shall mention next, as a direct 
contrast to Marlowe in everything but the 
smoothness of his verse. As Marlowe's imagi- 
nation glows like a furnace, Hey wood's is a 
gentle, lambent flame, that purifies without con- 
suming. His manner is simplicity itself. There 
is nothing supernatural, nothing startling, or 
terrific. He makes use of the commonest cir- 
cumstances of every-day life, and of the easiest 
tempers, to show the workings, or rather the 
inefficacy of the passions, the vis inertice of tra- 
gedy. His incidents strike from their very 
familiarity, and the distresses he paints invite 
our sympathy from the calmness and resigna- 
tion with which they are borne. The pathos 
might be deemed purer from its having no mix- 
ture of turbulence or vindictiveness in it ; and 
in proportion as the sufferers are made to deserve 
a better fate. In the midst of the most un- 
toward reverses and cutting injuries, good-nature 
and good sense keep their accustomed sway. 
He describes men's errors with tenderness, and 
their duties only with zeal, and the heightenings 
of a poetic fancy. His style is equally natural, 
simple, and unconstrained. The dialogue (bating 
the verse) is such as might be uttered in ordi- 
nary conversation. It is beautiful prose put 
into heroic measure. It is not so much that he 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 09 

uses the common English idiom for everything 
(for that I think the most poetical and impas- 
sioned of our elder dramatists do equally), but 
the simplicity of the characters, and the equable 
flow of the sentiments do not require or suffer 
it to be warped from the tone of level speaking, 
by figurative expressions, or hyperbolical allu- 
sions. A few scattered exceptions occur now 
and then, where the hectic flush of passion forces 
them from the lips, and they are not the worse 
for being rare. Thus, in the play called 
'A Woman Killed with Kindness,^ Wendoll, 
when reproached by Mrs Frankford with his 
obligations to her husband, interrupts her 
hastily, by saying 

" Oh speak no more ! 

For more than this I know, and have recorded 
Within the red-leaved table of my heart." 

And further on, Frankford, when doubting his 
wife's fidelity, says, with less feeling indeed, but 
with much elegance of fancy, 

" Cold drops of sweat sit dangling on my hairs, 
Like morning dew upon the golden flow'rs." 

So also, when returning to his house at mid- 
night to make the fatal discovery, he exclaims, 

" Astonishment, 

Fear, and amazement, beat upon my heart, 
Even as a madman beats upon a drum." 

It is the reality of things present to their ima- 
ginations that makes these writers so fine, so 
bold, and yet so true in what they describe. 



70 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Nature lies open to tliem like a book, and was 
not totliem '" invisible, or dimly seen" through 
a veil of words and filmy abstractions. Such 
poetical ornaments are however to be met with 
at considerable intervals in this play, and do not 
disturb the calm serenity and domestic simplicity 
of the author's style. The conclusion of Wen- 
doll's declaration of love to Mrs Frankford may 
serve as an illustration of its general merits, 
both as to purity of thought and diction. 

*' Fair, and of all beloved, I was not fearful 
Bluntly to give my life into your hand, 
And at one hazard, all my earthly means. 
Go, tell your husband : he will turn me off. 
And I am then undone. I care not, I ; 
'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me ; 
I care not ; 'twas for you. Say I incur 
The general name of villain through the world, 
Of traitor to my friend : I care not, I ; 
Poverty, shame, death, scandal, and reproach. 
For you I'll hazard all : why what care I ? 
For you I love, and for your love I'll die." 

The affecting remonstrance of Frankford to 
his wife, and her repentent agony at parting 
with him, are already before the public, in Mr 
Lamb's Specimens. The winding up of this 
play is rather awkwardly managed, and the 
moral is, according to established usage, equi- 
vocal. It required only Frankford's reconci- 
liation to his wife, as well as his forgiveness of 
her, for the highest breach of matrimonial duty, 
to have made a ' Woman Killed with Kindness/ 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 71 

a complete anticipation of the ' Stranger.' Hey- 
wood, however, was in that respect but half a 
Kotzebue ! — The view here given of country 
manners is truly edifying. As to the higher 
walk of tragedy, we see the manners and moral 
sentiments of kings and nobles of former times, 
here we have the feuds and amiable qualities of 
country 'squires and their relatives ; and such 
as were the rulers, such were their subjects. The 
frequent quarrels and ferocious habits of pri- 
vate life are well exposed in the fatal rencounter 
between Sir Francis Acton and Sir Charles 
Mountford about a hawking match, in the ruin 
and rancorous persecution of the latter in con- 
sequence, and in the hard, unfeeling, cold- 
blooded treatment he receives in his distress 
from his own relations, and from a fellow of the 
name of Shafton. After reading the sketch of 
this last character, who is introduced as a mere 
ordinary personage, the representative of a class, 
without any preface or apology, no one can 
doubt the credibility of that of Sir Giles Over- 
reach, who is professedly held up (I should think 
almost unjustly) as a prodigy of grasping and 
hardened selfishness. The influence of philo- 
sophy and prevalence of abstract reasoning, if it 
has done nothing for our poetry, has done, I 
should hope, something for our manners. The 
callous declaration of one of these unconscion- 
able churls, 

" This is no world in which to pity men,** 



72 ON LYLY, MAKLOWE, 

might have been taken as a motto for the good 
old times in general, and with a very few re- 
servations, if Heywood has not grossly libelled 
them. — Heywood's plots have little of artifice 
pY regularity of design to recommend them. He 
w rites on carelessly, as it happens, and trusts to 
Nature, and a certain happy tranquillity of 
spirit, for gaining the favour of the audience. 
He is said, besides attending to his duties as an 
actor, to have composed regularly a sheet a day. 
This may account in some measure for the un- 
embarrassed facility of his style. His own ac- 
count makes the number of his writings for the 
stage, or those in which he had a main hand, 
upwards of two hundred. In fact, I do not 
wonder at any quantity that an author is said 
to have written ; for the more a man writes^ 
the more he can write. 

The same remarks will apply, with certain 
modifications, to other remaining works of this 
writer, the ' Royal King and Loyal Subject,' 
' A Challenge for Beauty,' and ' The English 
Traveller.' The barb of misfortune is sheathed 
in the mildness of the writer's temperament, and 
the story jogs on very comfortably, without ef- 
fort or resistance, to the euthanasia of the catas- 
trophe. In two of these the person principally 
aggrieved survives, and feels himself none the 
worse for it. The most splendid passage in 
Heywood's comedies is the account of Ship- 
wreck by Drink, in ' The English Traveller/ 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 73 

which was the foundation of Cowley's Latin 
poem^ Naufragium Jocular e. 

The names of Middleton and Rowley, with 
which I shall conclude this Lecture, generally 
appear together as two writers who frequently 
combined their talents in the production of 
joint pieces. Middleton (judging from their 
separate works) was " the more potent spirit '' 
of the two ; but they were neither of them equal 
to some others. Rowley appears to have ex- 
celled in describing a certain amiable quietness 
of disposition and disinterested tone of morality, 
carried almost to a paradoxical excess, as in his 
' Fair Quarrel/ and in the comedy of ' A Wo- 
man never Vexed/ which is written in many 
parts, with a pleasing simplicity and naivete 
equal to the novelty of the conception. Middle- 
ton's style was not marked by any peculiar 
quality of his own, but was made up, in equal 
proportions, of the faults and excellences com- 
mon to his contemporaries. In his ' Women 
beware Women,' there is a rich marrowy vein 
of internal sentiment, with line occasional in- 
sight into human nature, and cool cutting irony 
of expression. He is lamentably deficient in 
the plot and denouement of the story. It is 
like the rough draught of a tragedy, with a 
number of fine things thrown in, and the best 
made use of first ; but it tends to no fixed goal, 
and the interest decreases, instead of increasing 
as we read on, for want of previous arrange- 



74 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

ment and an eye to the whole. We have fine 
studies of heads, a piece of richly coloured dra- 
pery, " a foot, an hand, an eye from Nature 
drawn, that's worth a history ; " but the 
groups are ill disposed, nor are the figures pro- 
portioned to each other or the size of the canvas. 
The author's power is in the subject, not over it ; 
or he is in possession of excellent materials, 
which he husbands very ill. This character, 
though it applies more particularly to Middle- 
ton, might be applied generally to the age. 
Shakspeare alone seemed to stand over his work, 
and to do what he pleased with it. He saw to 
the end of what he was about, and with the 
same faculty of lending himself to the impulses 
of Nature and the impression of the moment, 
never forgot that he himself had a task to per- 
form, nor the place which each figure ought to 
occupy in his general design. — The characters 
of Livia, of Brancha, of Leantio and his mother, 
in the play of which I am speaking, are all ad- 
mirably drawn. The art and malice of Livia 
shew equal want of principle and acquaintance 
with the world; and the scene in which she 
holds the mother in suspense, while she betrays 
the daughter into the power of the profligate 
duke, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The 
proneness of Brancha to tread the primrose path 
of pleasure, after she has made the first false 
step, and her sudden transition from unble- 
mished virtue to the most abandoned vice, in 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 75 

in which she is notably seconded by her mother- 
in-law's ready submission to the temptations of 
wealth and power, form a true and striking 
picture. The first intimation of the intrigue 
that follow^s, is given in a way that is not a 
little remarkable for simplicity and acuteness. 
Brancha says, 
" Did not the duke look up ? Methought he saw us." 

To which the more experienced mother an- 
sw^ers, 

" That's every one's conceit that sees a duke ; 
If he look stedfastly, he looks straight at them, 
When he perhaps, o^ood careful gentleman, 
Never minds any, but the look he casts 
Is at his own intentions, and his object 
Only the public good." 

It turns out, however, that he had been look- 
ing at them, and not ^^at the public good.'* 
The moral of this tragedy is rendered more 
impressive from the manly, independent cha- 
racter of Leantio in the first instance, and the 
manner in which he dwells, in a sort of doting 
abstraction, on his own comforts, of being pos- 
sessed of a beautiful and faithful wife. As he 
approaches his own house, and already treads 
on the brink of perdition, he exclaims with 
an exuberance of satisfaction not to be re- 
strained — 

" How near am I to a happiness 
That earth exceeds not ! not another like it : 
The treasures of the deep are not so precious. 



76 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

As are the concealed comforts of a man 
Lock'd up in woman's love. I scent the air 
Of blessings when I come but near the house : 
What a delicious breath marriage sends forth ! 
The violet bed's not sweeter. Honest wedlock 
Is like a banquetting house built in a garden, 
On which the spring's chaste flowers take delight 
To cast their modest odours ; when base lustj 
With all her powders, paintings, and best pride, 
Is but a fair house built by a ditch side. 
When I behold a glorious dangerous strumpet, 
Sparkling in beauty and destruction too, 
Both at a twinkling, I do liken straight 
Her beautified body to a goodly temple 
That's built on vaults where carcases lie rotting ; 
And so by little and little I shrink back again. 
And quench desire with a cool meditation ; 
And I'm as well, methinks. Now for a welcome 
Able to draw men's envies upon man : 
A kiss now that will hang upon my lip. 
As sweet as morning dew upon a rose, 
And full as long ; after a five days' fast 
She'll be so greedy now and cling about me : 
I take care how I shall be rid of her ; 
And here 't begins.'* 

This dream is dissipated by the entrance of 
Brancha and his Mother. 

" Bran, Oh, sir, you're welcome home. 

Moth. Oh, is he come ? I am glad on't. 

Lean. {Aside. ) Is that all ? 
Why this is dreadful now as sudden death 
To some rich man that flatters all his sins 
With promise of repentance when he's old. 
And dies in the midway before he comes to 't. 
Sure you're not well, Brancha ! how dost, prithee ? 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 77 

Bran, I have been better than I am at this time. 

Lean, Alas, I thought so. 

Bran, Nay, I have been worse too, 
Than now you see me, sir. 

Lean. I'm glad thou mendst yet, 
I feel my heart mend too. How came it to thee ? 
Has any thing dislik'd thee in my absence ? 

Bran, No, certain, I have had the best content ,_ 
That Florence can afford. 

Lean. Thou makest the best on't : 
Speak, mother, what's the cause ? you must needs know. 

Moth. Troth, I know none, son ; let her speak herself; 
Unless it be the same gave Lucifer a tumbling cast ; that's 
pride. 

Bran. Methinks this house stands nothing to my mind ; 
I'd have some pleasant lodging i' th' high street, sir ; 
Or if 'twere near the court, sir, that were much better ; 
'Tis a sweet recreation for a gentlewoman 
To stand in a bay-window, and see gallants. 

Lean. Now I have another temper, a mere stranger 
To that of yours, it seems ; I should delight 
To see none but yourself. 

Bran. I praise not that ; 
Too fond is as unseemly as too churlish ; 
I would not have a husband of that proneness. 
To kiss me before company, for a world : 
Besides, 'tis tedious to see one thing still, sir, 
Be it the best that ever heart affected ; 
Nay, were't yourself, whose love had power you know * 
To bring me from my friends, I would not stand thus, 
And gaze upon you always ; troth, I could not, sir ; 
As good be bUnd, and have no use of sight. 
As look on one thing still : what's the eye's treasure, 
But change of objects ? You are learned, sir, 
And know I speak not ill; 'tis full as virtuous 
For woman's eye to look on several men, 
As for her heart, sir, to be fixed on one. 



78 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Lean, Now, thou com'st home to me ; a kiss for that 
word. 

Bran. No matter for a kiss, sir ; let it pass ; 
'Tis but a toy, we'll not so much as mind it ; 
Let's talk of other business, and forget it. 
What news now of the pirates ? any stirring ? 
Prithee discourse a little. 

Moth, {Aside.) I'm glad he's here yet, 
To see her tricks himself; 1 had lied monstrously 
If I had told 'em first. 

Lean. Speak, what's the humour, sweet, 
You make your lips so strange ? This was xxoC wont. 

Bran. Is there no kindness betwixt man and wife. 
Unless they make a pigeon-house of friendship. 
And be still billing ? 'tis the idlest fondness 
That ever was invented ; and 'tis pity 
It's grown a fashion for poor gentlewomen ; 
There's many a disease kiss'd in a year by't, 
And a French court'sy made to't : Alas, sir, 
Think of the world, how we shall live, grow serious ; 
We have been married a whole fortnight now. 

Lean. How ? a whole fortnight ! why, is that so long ? 

Bran. 'Tis time to leave off dalliance ; 'tis a doctrine 
Of your own teaching, if you be remember'd, 
And I was bound to obey it. 

Moth. {Aside. ) Here's one fits him ; 
This was well catch'd i' faith, son, like a fellow 
That rids another country of a plague. 
And brings it home with him to his own house. 

\_A messenger from the Duke knocks within. 
Who knocks ? 

Lean. Who's there now ? Withdraw you, Brancha ; 
Thou art a gem no stranger's eye must see, 
Howe'er thou'rt pleas'd now to look dull on me. 

{^Exit Brancha.'' 

The Witch of Middleton is his most remark- 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 79 

able performance ; both on its own account, and 
from the use that Shakspeare has made of some 
of the characters and speeches in his ' Macbeth/ 
Though the employment which Middleton has 
given to Hecate and the rest, in thwarting the 
purposes and perplexing the business of familiar 
and domestic life, is not so grand or appalling 
as the more stupendous agency which Shaks- 
peare has assigned them, yet it is not easy to 
deny the^^iierit of the first invention to Middle- 
ton, who has embodied the existing supersti- 
tions of the time, respecting that anomalous 
class of beings, with a high spirit of poetry, of 
the most grotesque and fanciful kind. The 
songs and incantations made use of are very 
nearly ihe same. The other parts of this play 
are not so good ; and the solution of the princi- 
pal difficulty, by Antonio's falling down a trap- 
door, most lame and impotent. As a specimen 
of the similarity of the preternatural machi- 
nery, I shall here give one entire scene. 

" TJie Witches* Habitation. 
Enter Heccat, Stadlin, Hoppo, and other Witches. 

Hec. The moon's a gallant : see how brisk she rides. 

Stad. Here's a rich evening, Heccat. 

Hec. Aye, is 't not, wenches, 
To take a journey of five thousand miles ? 

Hop. Ours will be more to-night. 

Hec. Oh, 't will be precious. Heard you the owl yet ? 

Stad. Briefly, in the copse, 
As we came through now. 

Hec. 'Tis high time for us then. 



80 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Stad, There was a bat hung at my lips three times 
As we came through the woods, and drank her fill : 
Old Puckle saw her. 

Hec. You are fortunate still, 
The very scritch-owl lights upon your shoulder, 
And woos you like a pigeon. Are you furnish'd? 
Have you your ointments ? 

Stad. All. 

Hec. Prepare to flight then. 
I'll overtake you swiftly. 

Stad. Hie then, Heccat ! 
We shall be up betimes. 

Hec. I'll reach you quickly. [ They ascend. 

Enter Firestone. 

Fire. They are all going a birding to-night. They talk 
of fowls i' th' air, that fly by day, I'm sure ther'll be a 
company of foul sluts there to-night. If we have not 
mortality aff'eared, I'll be hang'd, for they are able to pu- 
trify it, to infect a whole region. She spies me now. 

Hec. What, Firestone, our sweet son ? 

Fire. A little sweeter than some of you ; or a dunghill 
were too good for me. 

Hec. How much hast there ? 

Fire. Nineteen, and all brave plump ones ; besides six 
lizards, and three serpentine eggs. 

Hec. Dear and sweet boy ! What herbs hast thou ? 

Fire. I have some mar-martin and man- dragon. 

Hec. Marmarittin, and mandragora, thou would'st say. 

Fire. Here's pannax, too. I thank thee ; my pan akes, 
I am sure, with kneeling down to cut 'em. 

Hec. And selago, 
Hedge-hissop, too ! How near he goes my cuttings } 
Were they all cropt by moon-light ? 

Fire. Every blade of 'em, or I am a moon-calf, mother. 

Hec. Hie thee home with 'em. 
Look well to th' house to-night : I'm for aloft. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 81 

Fire. Aloft, quoth you ? I would you would break your 
neck once, that I might have all quickly {Aside), — Hark, 
hark, mother ! They are above the steeple already, flying 
over your head with a noise of musicians. 

Hec. They are indeed. Help me ! Help me ! I'm too 
iate else. 

SONG {in the air above). 
Come away, come away! 
Heccat, Heccat, come away ! 
Hec. I come, I come, I come, I come, 

With all the speed I may, 
With all the speed I may. 
Where's Stadlin? 
(^Ahove). Here. 
Hec. Where's Puckle? 

{Above). Here : 

And Hoppo too, and Hellwain too : 
We lack but you, we lack but you. 
Come away, make up the count ! 
Hec. I will but 'noint, and then I mount. 

{A Spirit descends in the shape of a cat,) 

{Above). There's one come down to fetch his dues ; 
A kiss, a coll, a sip of blood ; 
And why thou stay'st so long, I muse, I muse, 
Since th' air's so sweet and good ? 
Hec. Oh, art thou come, 

WTiat news, what news ? 
Spirit. All goes still to our delight, 
Either come, or else 
Refuse, refuse. 
Hec. Now I am furnish'd for the flight. 

Fire. Hark, hark ! The cat sings a brave treble in her 

own language. 
Hec. {Ascending with the Spirit), 
Now I go, now I fly, 
Malkin, my sweet spirit, and L 

G 



82 ON LYLY, MARLOWEy 

Oh, what a dainty pleasure 'tis 

To ride in the air 

When the moon shines fair, 
And sing, and dance, and toy, and kiss ? 
Over woods, high rocks, and mountains. 
Over seas our mistress' fountains, 
Over steep towers and turrets 
We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits. 
No ring of bells to our ears sounds. 
No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds ; 
No, not the noise of water's breach. 
Or cannon's roar our height can reach. 
(Above). No ring of bells, &c. 

Fire. Well, mother, I thank your kindness. You must be 
gamboling i' the air, and leave me to walk here like a fool 
and a mortal. [Exit. 

The incantation scene at the cauldron is also 
the original of that in Macbeth, and is in like 
manner introduced by the Duchess's visiting the 
Witches' habitation. 

" TTie Witches' habitation. 
Enter Duchess, Heccat, Firestone. 

Hec. What death is 't you desire for Almachildes ? 

Duch. A sudden and a subtle. 

Hec. Then I've fitted you. 
Here lie the gifts of both ; sudden and subtle ; 
His picture made in wax and gently molten 
By a blue fire kindled with dead men's eyes, 
Will waste him by degrees. 

Duch. In what time, pr'ythee ? 

Hec. Perhaps in a month's progress. 

Duch. What! A month? 
Out upon pictures, if they be so tedious 5 
Give me things with some life. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 83 

Hec. Then seek no farther. 

Duch This must be done with speed, dispatched this 
night, 
If it may possibly. 

Hec. I have it for you : 
Here's that will do't. Stay but perfection's time, 
And that's not five hours hence. 

Duch. Can'st thou do this ? 

Hec, Can I? 

Duch. I mean, so closely. 

Hec. So closely do you mean too ? 

Duch. So artfully, so cunningly. 

Hec. Worse and worse ; doubts and incredulities^ 
They make me mad. Let scrupulous creatures know, 

Cum volui, ripis ipsis mirantibus, amnes 
In fontes rediere suos : concussaque sisto, 
Stantia concutio cantu freta ; nubila pello, 
Nubilaque induco : ventos abigoque vocoque. 
Vipereas rumpo verbis et carmine fauces ; 
Et silvas moveo, jubeoque tremiscere montes, 
Et mugire solum, manesque exire sepulchris. 
Te quoque, Luna, traho. 

Can you doubt me then, daughter ? 

That can make mountains tremble, miles of woods walk ; 

Whole earth's foundations bellow, and the spirits 

Of the entomb'd to burst out from their marbles ; 

Nay, draw yon moon to my involv'd designs? 

Fire. I know as well as can be when my mother's mad, 
and our great cat angry ; for one spits French then, and 
the other spits Latin. 

Duch. I did not doubt you, mother. 

Hec. No ? what did you ? 
My power's so firm, it is not to be question'd. 

Duch. Forgive what's past : and now I know th' offen- 
siveness 
That vexes art, I'll shun the occasion ever. 



84 ON LYLY, MARLOWE, 

Hec, Leave all to me and my five sisters, daughter. 
It shall be conveyed in at howlet-time. 
Take you no care. My spirits know their moments ; 
Raven or scritch-owl never fly by th' door. 
But they call in (I thank 'em), and they lose not by 't. 
I give 'em barley soak'd in infants' blood : 
They shall have semina cum sanguine. 
Their gorge cramm'd full, if they come once to our house : 
We are no niggard. [Exit Duchess. 

Fire. They fare but too well when they come hither. 
They ate up as much t' other night as would have made 
me a good conscionable pudding. 

Hec. Give me some lizard's brain : quickly, Firestone ! 
Where's grannam Stadlin, and all the rest o' th' sisters? 

Fire. All at hand, forsooth. [ The other Witches appear. 

Hec. Give me marmaritin ; some bear-breech. When? 

Fire. Here's bear-breech and lizard's brain, forsooth. 

Hec. Into the vessel ; 
And fetch three ounces of the red-hair'd girl 
I kill'd last midnight. 

Fire. Whereabout, sweet mother? 

Hec. Hip ; hip or flank. Where is the acopus ? 

Fire. You shall have acopus, forsooth. 

Hec. Stir, stir about, whilst I begin the charm. 

A CHARM SONG. 
( The Witches going about the cauldron. ) 
Black spirits, and white ; red spirits, and grey ; 
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 

Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff" in ; 

Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky ; 

Liard, Robin, you must bob in. 
Round, around, around, about, about; 
All ill come running in ; all good keep out ! 

Ist Witch. Here's the blood of a bat. 

Hec. Put in that ; oh, put in that. 

2nd Witch. Here's libbard's-bane. 



HEYWOOD, MIDDLETOX, ETC. 85 

Hec. Put in again. 

1st Witch The juice of toad; the oil of adder. 

2nd Witch. Those will make the younker madder, 

Hec. Put in: there's all, and rid the stench. 

Fire. Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd 

wench. 
All Round, around, around, &c. 

Hec. So, so, enough : into the vessel with it. 

There ; 't hath the true perfection. I'm so 

light. 
At any mischief : there's no villany 
But is a tune, methinks. 
Fire. A tune ! 'Tis to the tune of damnation then, I 
warrant you, and that song hath a \dllanous burthen. 
Hec. Come, my sweet sisters ; let the air strike 

our tune 
Whilst we show reverence to yon peeping 
moon. 

[The Witches dance, and then exeunt.'' 

I will conclude this account with Mr Lamb's 
observations on the distinctive characters of these 
extraordinary and formidable personages, as they 
are described by Middleton or Shakspeare. 

" Though some resemblance may be traced 
between the Charms in Macbeth and the Incan- 
tations in this play, which is supposed to have 
preceded it, this coincidence will not detract 
much from the originality of Shakspeare. His 
witches are distinguished from the witches of 
Middleton by essential differences. These are 
creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some 
dire mischief, might resort for occasional consul- 
tation. Those originate deeds of blood, and 



86 ON LYLYj MARLOWE, 

begin bad impulses to men. From the moment 
that their eyes first meet Macbeth*s, he is spell- 
bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He 
can never break the fascination. These Witches 
can hurt the body ; those have power over the 
soul. — Hecate, in Middleton, has a son, a low 
buffoon : the Hags of Shakspeare have neither 
child of their own, nor seem to be descended 
from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of 
whom we know not whence they sprung, nor 
whether they have beginning or ending. As 
they are without human passions, so they seem 
to be without human relations. They come with 
thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. 
This is all we know of them. — Except Hecate, 
they have no names, which heightens their 
mysteriousness. The names, and some of the 
properties which Middleton has given to his 
Hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are 
serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist 
with mirth. But iii a lesser degree, the Witches 
of Middleton are fine creations. Their power 
too is, in some measure, over the mind. They 
' raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf 
o'er life.' '^* 



* Lamb's * Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.* Vol. 1, 
p. 187. Moxon, London. 



LECTURE IIL 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND 
WEBSTER. 

The writers of whom I have already treated 
may be said to have been "no mean men;" 
those of whom I have yet to speak are certainly 
no whit inferior. Would that I could do them 
anything like justice ! It is not difficult to give 
at least their seeming due to great and well- 
known names ; for the sentiments of the reader 
meet the descriptions of the critic more than 
half way, and clothe what is perhaps vague and 
extravagant praise with a substantial form and 
distinct meaning. But in attempting to extol 
the merits of an obscure work of genius, our 
words are either lost in empty air, or are " blown 
stifling back" upon the mouth that utters them. 
The greater those merits are, and the truer the 
praise, the more suspicious and disproportionate 
does it almost necessarily appear ; for it has no 
relation to any image previously existing in the 
public mind, and thei^efore looks like an imposi- 
tion fabricated out of nothing. In this case, the 
only way that I know of is, to make these old 



88 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

writers (as much as can be) vouchers for their 
own pretensions, which they are well able to 
make good. I shall in the present Lecture give 
some account of Marston and Chapman, and 
afterwards of Decker and Webster. 

Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose 
to tragedy from the ground of comedy, and 
who^e forte was not sympathy, either with the 
stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient 
scorn and bitter indignation against the vices 
and follies of men, which vented itself either in 
comic irony or in lofty invective. He was pro- 
perly a satirist. He was not a favourite with 
his contemporaries, nor they with him. He wa& 
first on terms of great intimacy, and afterwards 
at open war, with Ben Jonson ; and he is most 
unfairly criticised in The Return from Par- 
nassus, sunder the name of Monsieur Kinsayder,) 
as a mere libeller and buffoon. Writers in their 
life-time do all they can to degrade and vilify 
one another, and expect posterity to have a very 
tender care of their reputations 1 The writers of 
this age, in general, cannot however be re- 
proached with this infirmity. The number of 
plays that they wrote in conjunction is a proof 
of the contrary ; and a circumstance no less 
curious, as to the division of intellectual labour, 
than the cordial union of sentiment it implied. 
Unlike most poets, the love of their art sur- 
mounted their hatred of one another. Genius 
was not become a vile and vulgar pretence, and 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 89 

they respected in others what they knew to be 
true inspiration in themselves. They courted 
the applause of the multitude, but came to one 
another for judgment and assistance. When 
we see these writers working together on the 
same admirable productions, year after year, as 
was the case with Beaumont and Fletcher, Mid- 
dleton and Rowley, with Chapman, Decker, 
and Jonson, it reminds one of Ariosto's elo- 
quent apostrophe to the Spirit of Ancient Chi- 
valry, when he has Seated his rival knights, 
Renaldo and Ferraw, on the same horse. 

" Oh ancient knights of true and noble heart, 
They rivals were, one faith they liv'd not under ; 
Besides, they felt their bodies shrewdly smart 
Of blows late given, and yet (behold a wonder) 
Thro' thick and thin, suspicion set apart, 
Like friends they ride, and parted not asunder, 
Until the horse with double spurring drived 
Unto a way parted in two, arrived. "* 

Marston's Antonio and Mellida is a tragedy 
of considerable force and pathos; but in the 
most critical parts, the author frequently breaks 
off or flags without any apparent reason but 
want of interest in his subject; and farther, the 
best and most affecting situations and bursts of 
feeling are too evidently imitations of Shaks- 
peare. Thus the unexpected meeting between 
Andrugio and Lucio; in the beginning of the 
third act, is a direct counterpart of that between 

* Sir John Harrington's translation. 



90 ON MARSTOX, CHAPMAN, 

Lear and Kent, only much weakened: and the 
interview between Antonio and Mellida has a 
strong resemblance to the still more affecting 
one between Lear and Cordelia, and is most 
wantonly disfigured by the sudden introduction 
of half a page of Italian rhymes, which gives 
the whole an air of burlesque. The conversa- 
tion of Lucio and Andrugio, again, after his 
defeat seems to invite, but will not bear a com- 
parison with Richard the Second's remonstrance 
with his courtiers, who offered him consolation 
in his misfortunes ; and no one can be at a loss 
to trace the allusion to Romeo's conduct on 
being apprized of his banishment, in the termi- 
nation of the following speech. 

" Antonio, Each man takes hence life, but no man death 
He's a good fellow, and keeps open house ; 
A thousand thousand ways lead to his gate, 
To his wide mouthed porch : when niggard life 
Hath but one little, little wicket through. 
We wring ourselves into this wretched world 
To pule and weep, exclaim, to curse and rail, 
To fret and ban the fates, to strike the earth 
As I do now. Antonio, curse thy birth. 
And die." 

The following short passage might be quoted 
as one of exquisite beauty and originality — 
— " As having clasp'd a rose 
Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, 
My hand retains a little breath of sweet ; 
So may man's trunk, his spirit slipp'd away. 
Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest." 

Act IV, Scene 1. 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 91 

The character of Felice in this play is an 
admirable satirical accompaniment, and is the 
favourite character of this author (in all proba- 
bility his own), that of a shrewd, contemplative 
cynic, and sarcastic spectator in the drama of 
human life. It runs through all his plays, is 
shared by Quadratus and Lampatho in ' What 
you Wiir (it is into the mouth of the last of 
these that he has put that fine invective against 
the uses of philosophy, in the account of him- 
self and his spaniel, '' who still slept while he 
baus'd leaves, tossed o'er the dunces, por'd on 
the old print"), and is at its height in the Fawn 
andMalevole, in his ' Parasitaster' and ' Malcon- 
tent.' These two comedies are his chef-d'oeuvres. 
The character of the Duke Hercules of Ferrara, 
disguised as the Parasite, in the first of these, 
is well sustained thoughout, with great sense, 
dignity, and spirit. He is a wise censurer of 
men and things, and rails at the world with 
charitable bitterness. He may put in a claim 
to a sort of family likeness to the Duke, in 
' Measure for Measure,' only the latter descends 
from his elevation to watch in secret over serious 
crimes; the other is only a spy on private 
follies. There is something in this cast of 
character (at least in comedy — perhaps it neu- 
tralizes the tone and interest in tragedy), that 
finds a wonderful reciprocity in the breast of 
the reader or audience. It forms a kind of 
middle term or point of union between the busy 



92 0^ MARSTON, CHAPMAN^ 

actors in the scene and the indifferent by- 
stander, insinuates the plot, and suggests a 
number of good wholesome reflections, for the 
sagacity and honesty of which we do not fail 
to take credit to ourselves. We are let into 
its confidence, and have a perfect reliance on 
its sincerity. Our sympathy with it is without 
any drawback ; for it has no part to perform 
itself, and " is nothing, if not critical." It is 
a sure card to play. We may doubt the motives 
of heroic actions, or differ about the just limits 
and extreme workings of the passions ; but the 
professed misanthrope is a character that no 
one need feel any scruples in trusting, since the 
dislike of folly and knavery in the abstract is 
common to knaves and fools with the wise and 
honest ! Besides the instructive moral vein of 
Hercules as the Fawn or Parasitaster, which 
contains a world of excellent matter most aptly 
and wittily delivered, there are two other 
characters perfectly hit off, Gonzago, the old 
prince of Urbino, and Granuffo, one of his 
lords in waiting. The loquacious, good- 
humoured, undisguised vanity of the one is 
excellently relieved by the silent gravity of the 
other. The wit of this last character (Granuffo) 
consists in his not speaking a word through the 
whole play ; he never contradicts what is said, 
and only assents by implication. He is a most 
infallible courtier, and follows the prince like 
his shadow, who thus graces his pretensions. 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 93 

•* We would be private, only Faunus stay ; he is a wise 
fellow, daughter, a very wise fellow, for he is still just of 
my opinion ; my Lord Granuffo, you may likewise stay, 
for I know you'll say nothing." 

And again, a little farther on, he says — 

" Faunus, this Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man 
of excellent discourse, and never speaks ; his signs to me 
and men of profound reach instruct abundantly ; he begs 
suits with signs, gives thanks with signs, puts off his hat 
leisurely, maintains his beard learnedly, keeps his lust 
privately, makes a nodding leg courtly, and lives happily." 
— " Silence," [replies Hercules,] " is an excellent modest 
grace ; but especially before so instructing a wisdom as 
that of your Excellency." 

The garrulous self-complacency of this old 
lord is kept up in a vein of pleasant humour ; 
an instance of which might be given in his 
owning of some learned man, that "though he 
was no duke, yet he was wise ;" and the manner 
in which the others play upon this foible, and 
make him contribute to his own discomfiture, 
without his having the least suspicion of the 
plot against him, is full of ingenuity and coun- 
terpoint. In the last scene he says, very cha- 
racteristically, 

** Of all creatures breathing, I do hate those things 
that struggle to seem wise, and yet are indeed very fools. 
I remember when I was a young man, in my father's 
days, there were four gallant spirits for resolution, as pro- 
per for body, as witty in discourse, as any were in Europe ; 
nay, Europe had not such. I was one of them. We 
four did all love one lady ; a most chaste virgin she was -. 
we all enjoyed her, and so enjoyed her, that, despite the 



94 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

strictest guard was set upon her, we had her at our plea- 
sure. I speak it for her honour, and my credit. Where 
shall you find such witty fellows now-a-days ? Alas ! how 
easy is it in these weaker times to cross love- tricks ! Ha ! 
ha ! ha ! Alas, alas ! I smile to think ( I must confess with 
some glory to mine own wisdom), to think how I found 
out, and crossed, and curbed, and in the end made despe- 
rate Tiberio's love. Alas ! good silly youth, that dared 
to cope with age and such a beard ! 

Hercules. But what yet might your well-known wisdom 
think. 
If such a one, as being most severe, 
A most protested opposite to the match 
Of two young lovers ; who having barr'd them speech, 
All interviews, all messages, all means 
To plot their wished ends ; even he himself 
Was by their cunning made the go-between, 
The only messenger, the token- carrier ; 
Told them the times when they might fitly meet, 
Nay, show'd the way to one another's bed ?'* 

To which Gonzago replies, in a strain of 
exulting dotage : 

" May one have the sight of such a fellow for nothing ? 
Doth there breathe such an egregious ass ? Is there 
such a foolish animal in rerum natura ? How is it possible 
such a simplicity can exist ? Let us not lose our laughing 
at him, for God's sake \ let folly's sceptre light upon him, 
and to the Ship of Fools with him instantly. 

Dondolo. Of all these follies I arrest your grace." 

Moliere has built a play on nearly the same 
foundation, which is not much superior to the 
present. Marston, among other topics of satire, 
has a fling at the pseudo-critics and philosophers 
of his time, who were '^full of wise saws and 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 95 

modem instances/' Thus he freights his Ship 
of Fools. 

" Dondolo. Yes, yes ; but they got a supersedeas ; all 
of them proved themselves either knaves or madmen, and 
so were let go : there's none left now in our ship but a few 
citizens that let their wives keep their shop-books, some 
philosophers, and a few critics ; one of which critics has 
lost his flesh with fishing at the measure of Plautus* 
verses ; another has vowed to get the consumption of the 
lungs, or to leave to posterity the true orthography and 
pronunciation of laughing. 

Hercules But what philosophers ha' ye ? 
Dondolo. Oh, very strange fellows ; one knows nothing, 
dares not aver he lives, goes, sees, feels. 

Nymphadoro. A most insensible philosopher. 
Dondolo. Another, that there is no present time ; and 
that one man to-day and to-morrow, is not the same man; 
so that he that yesterday owed money, to-day owes none ;. 
because he is not the same man. 

Herod. Would that philosophy hold good in law ? 
Hercules. But why has the Duke thus laboured to 
have all the fools shipped out of his dominions ? 

Dondolo. Marry, because he would play the fool alone 
without any rival. Act IV, 

Moli^re has enlarged upon the same topic in 
his Mariage Force^ but not with more point 
or effect. Nymphadoro's reasons for devoting 
himself to the sex generally, and Hercules^s 
description of the different qualifications of dif- 
ferent men, will also be found to contain excel- 
lent specimens, both of style and matter. The 
disguise of Hercules as the Fawn is assumed 
voluntarily, and he is comparatively a calm and 
dispassionate observer of the times. Male- 



96 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

vole's disguise in the Malcontent has been 
forced upon him by usurpation and injustice, 
and his invectives are accordingly more impas- 
sioned and virulent. His satire does not '^ like 
a wild goose fly, unclaimed of any man,'' but has 
a bitter and personal application. Take him in 
the words of the usurping Duke's account of 
him. 

" This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections 
that ever conversed with Nature ; a man, or rather a 
monster, more discontent than Lucifer v^^hen he was 
thrust out of the presence. His appetite is unsatiable as 
the grave, as far from any content as from heaven. His 
highest delight is to procure others vexation, and therein 
he thinks he truly serves heaven ; for 'tis his position, 
whosoever in this earth can be contented is a slave, and 
damned ; therefore does he afflict all, in that to which 
they are most affected. The elements struggle with him ; 
his own soul is at variance with herself; his speech is 
halter-worthy at all hours. I like him, 'faith ; he gives 
good intelligence to my spirit, makes me understand 
those weaknesses which others' flattery palliates. 

Hark ! they sing. 

Enter Malevole, after the song, 

Pietro Jacomo. See he comes 1 Now shall you hear the 
extremity of a Malcontent ; he is as free as air ; he blows 
over every man. And — Sir, whence come you now? 

Malevole. From the public place of much dissimulation, 
the church. 

Pietro Jacomo. What didst there ? 

Malevole, Talk with a usurer ; take up at interest. 

Pietro Jacomo. I wonder what religion thou art of ? 

Malevole. Of a soldier's religion. 

Pietro Jacomo. And what dost think makes most infidels 
now? 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 97 

Malevole, Sects, sects. I am weary : would I were one 
of the Duke's hounds. 

Pietro Jacomo. But what's the common news abroad ? 
Thou dogg'st rumour still. 

Malevole. Common news ? Why, common words are, 
God save ye, Fare ye well : common actions, flattery and 
cozenage : common things, women and cuckolds. " 

Act I. Scene 3. 

In reading all this, one is somehow reminded 
perpetually of Mr Kean's acting : in Shakspeare 
we do not often think of him, except in those 
parts which he constantly acts, and in those one 
cannot forget him. I might observe on the 
above passage, in excuse for some bluntness of 
style, that the ideal barrier between names and 
things seems to have been greater then than 
now. Words have become instruments of more 
importance than formerly. To mention certain 
actions, is almost to participate in them, as if 
consciousness were the same as guilt. The 
standard of delicacy varies at different periods, 
as it does in different countries, and is not a ge- 
neral test of superiority. The French, who 
pique themselves (and justly, in some particu- 
lars) on their quickness of tact and refinement 
of breeding, say and do things which we, a 
plainer and coarser people, could not think of 
without a blush. What would seem gross allu- 
sions to us at present, were without offence to 
our ancestors, and many things passed for jests 
with them, or matters of indifference, which 
would not now be endured. Refinement of Ian- 



98 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

guage, however, does not keep pace with sim- 
plicity of manners. The severity of criticism 
exercised in onr theatres towards some unfortu- 
nate straggling phrases in the old comedies, is 
but an ambiguous compliment to the immaculate 
purity of modern times. Mars ton's style was 
by no means more guarded than that of his 
contemporaries. He was also much more 
of a free-thinker than Marlowe, and there is 
a frequent and not unfavourable allusion, 
in his works, to later sceptical opinions. — ■ 
In the play of the ' Malcontent ' we meet with 
an occasional mixture of comic gaiety, to re- 
lieve the more serious and painful business of 
the scene, as in the easy loquacious effrontery 
o{ the old intriguante Maquerella, and in the 
ludicrous facility with which the idle courtiers 
avoid or seek the notice of Malevole, as he is 
in or out of favour ; but the general tone and 
import of the piece is severe and moral. 
The plot is somewhat too intricate and too * 
often changed (like the shifting of a scene), 
so as to break and fritter away the interest 
at the end ; but the part of Aurelia, the 
Duchess of Pietro Jacomo, a dissolute and 
proud-spirited woman, is the highest strain of 
Marston's pen. The scene in particular, 
in which she receives and exults in th sup- 
posed news of her husband's death, is nearly 
unequalled in boldness of conception and in the 
unrestrained force of passion, taking away not 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 99 

only the consciousness of guilt, but overcoming 
the sense of shame.* 

Next to Marston, I must put Chapman, whose 
name is better known as the translator of Homer 
than as a dramatic writer. He is, like Marston, 
a philosophic observer, a didactic reasoner : but 
he has both more gravity in his tragic style, and 
more levity in his comic vein. CHis ' Bussy 
d'Ambois,' though not without interest or some 
fancy, is rather a collection of apophthegms or 
pointed sayings in the form of a dialogue, than 
a poem or a tragedy. In his verses the oracles 
have not ceased. Every other line is an axiom 
in morals — a libel on mankind, if truth is a libel. 
He is too stately for a wit, in his serious writ- 
ings — ^too formal for a poet. ^ ' Bussy d' Ambois ' is 
founded on a French plot and French manners. 
The character, from which it derives its name, 
is arrogant and ostentatious to an unheard-of 
degree, but full of nobleness and lofty spirit. 
His pride and unmeasured pretensions alone take 
away from his real merit ; and by the quarrels 
and intrigues in which they involve him, bring 
about the catastrophe, which has considerable 
grandeur and imposing effect, in the manner of 
Seneca. Our author aims at the highest things in 
poetry, and tries in vain, wanting imagination 
and passion, to fill up the epic moulds of tragedy 
with sense and reason alone, so that he often runs 
into bombast and turgidity — is extravagant and 
' * See conclusion of Lecture IV. 



100 . ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

pedantic at one and the same time. From the 
nature of the plot, which turns upon a love in- 
trigue, much of the philosophy of this piece 
relates to the character of the sex. Milton says 

" The way of woman's will is hard to hit." 
But old Chapman professes to have found the 
clue to it, and winds hi^ uncouth way through 
all the labyrinth of love. Its deepest recesses 
*'hide nothing from his view.'* The close in- 
trigues of court policy, the subtle workings of 
the human soul, move before him like a sea dark, 
deep, and glittering with wrinkles for the smile 
of beauty. Fulke Greville alone could go be- 
yond him in gravity and mystery. The plays of 
the latter (Mustapha and Alaham) are abstruse 
as the mysteries of old, and his style inexplicable 
as the riddles of the Sphinx. As an instance of 
his love for the obscure, the marvellous, and im- 
possible, he calls up " the ghost of one of the old 
kings of Ormus," as a prologue to one of his 
tragedies ; a very reverend and inscrutable per- 
sonage, who, we may be sure, blabs no living 
secrets. Chapman, in his other pieces, where he 
lays aside the gravity of the philosopher and 
poet, discovers an unexpected comic vein, distin- 
guished by equal truth of nature and lively good 
humour. I cannot say that this character per- 
vades any one of his entire comedies ; but the 
introductory sketch of Monsieur D'Olive is the 
undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, 
and infinitely delightful class of character, of 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 101 

the professed men of wit and pleasure about 
town, which we have in such perfection in 
Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, 
Witwoud, and Petulant, &c., both in the senti- 
ments and in the style of writing. For example, 
takethe last scene of the first act. 
Enter D' Olive. 

Rhoderique. What, Monsieur D' Olive, the only admirer 
of wit and good words. 

D' Olive, Morrow, wits : morrow, good wits : my little 
parcels of wit, I have rods in pickle for you. How dost, 
Jack ; may I call thee, sir. Jack yet ? 

Mugeron, You may, sir ; sir's as commendable an addi- 
tion as Jack, for aught I know. 

Z)' 01. I know it, Jack, and as common too. 

Rhod, Go to, you may cover ; we have taken notice of 
your embroidered beaver. 

D'OL Look you : by heaven thou'rt one of the maddest 
bitter slaves in Europe : I do but wonder how I made shift 
to love thee all this while. 

Rhod. Go to, what might such a parcel-gilt cover be 
worth ? 

Mug. Perhaps more than the whole piece beside. 

D'OL Goodi'faith, but bitter. Oh, you mad slaves, I 
think you had Satyrs to your sires, yet I must love you, I 
must take pleasure in you, and i'faith tell me, how is't ? 
live I see you do, but how ? but how, wits ? 

Rhod. 'Faith, as you see, like poor younger brothers. 

D'Ol. By your wits? 

Mug. Nay, not turned poets, neither. 

Z)' 01, Good in sooth ! But indeed, to say truth, time 
was when the sons of the Muses had the privilege to live 
only by their wits, but times are altered ; monopolies are 
now called in, and wit's become a free trade for all sorts to 
live by : lawyers live by wit, and they live worship- 



102 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

fully : soldiers live by wit, and they live honourably : pan^ 
ders live by wit, and they live honestly : in a word, there 
are but few trades but live by wit, only bawds and midwives 
by women's labours, as fools and fiddlers do making mirth, 
pages and parasites by making legs, painters and players by 
making mouths and faces : ha, does't well, wits ? 

Rhod. 'Faith, thou followest a figure in thy jests, as 
country gentlemen follow fashions, when they be worn 
threadbare. 

Z)' 01. Well, well, let's leave these wit skirmishes, and 
say when shall we meet ? 

Mug. How think you, are we not met now ? 

Z)' 01. Tush, man ! I mean at my chamber, where we 
may make free use of ourselves ; that is, drink sack, and 
talk satire, and let our wits run the wild-goose chase over 
court and country. I will have my chamber the rendez- 
vous of all good wits, the shop of good words, the mint of 
good jests, an ordinary of fine discourse; critics, essayists, 
linguists, poets, and other professors of that faculty of wit, 
shall at certain hours i' th' day, resort thither ; it shall be 
a second Sorbonne, where all doubts or differences of 
learning, honour, duellism, criticism, and poetry, shall be 
disputed : and how, wits, do ye follow the court still ? 

Bhod. Close at heels, sir ; and I can tell you, you have 
much to answer to your stars, that you do not so too. 

Z)' 01. As why, wits ? as why ? 

Rhod. Why, sir, the court's as 'twere the stage : and they 
that have a good suit of parts and qualities ought to press 
thither to grace them, and receive their due merit. 

ly 01. Tush, let the court follow me : he that soars too 
near the sun, melts his wings many times ; as I am, I pos- 
sess myself, I enjoy my liberty, my learning, my wit : as 
for wealth and honour, let 'em go ; I'll not lose my learn- 
ing to be a lord, nor my wit to be an alderman. 

Mug. Admirable D' Olive ! 

Z>' 01. And what ! you stand gazing at this comet here, 
and admire it, I dare say. 



DECKER, AXD WEBSTER. 103 

Rhod. And do not you? 

Z)' OL Not I, I admire nothing but wit. 

JRhod. But I wonder how she entertains time in that 
solitary cell : does she not take tobacco, think you ? 

D'OL She does, she does : others make it their physic, 
she makes it her food : her sister and she take it by turn, 
first one, then the other, and Vandome ministers to them 
both. 

Mug. How sayest thou by that Helen of Greece the 
Countess's sister ? here were a paragon, Monsieur D' Olive, 
to admire and marry too. 

D'Ol. Not forme. 

Rhod. No ! what exceptions lie against the choice ? 

D'Ol. Tush, t^ll me not of choice ; if I stood affected 
that way, I would choose my wife as men do valentines, 
blindfold, or draw cuts for them, for so I shall be sure not 
to be deceived in choosing ; for take this of me, there's 
ton times more doceit in women than in horse-flesh ; and 
I say still, that a pretty well-pac'd chamber-maid is the 
only fashion; if she grows full or fulsome, give her but six- 
pence to buy her a hand-basket, and send her the way of 
all flesh, there's no more but so. 

Mug. Indeed that's the savingest way. 

D'Ol. O me ! what a hell 'tis for a man to be tied to 
the continual charge of a coach, with the appurtenances, 
horses, men, and so forth ; and then to have a man's house 
pestered with a whole country of guests, grooms, panders, 
waiting maids, &c. I careful to please my wife, she care. 
less to displease me ; shrewish if she be honest ; into- 
lerable if she be wise ; imperious as an empress ; all she 
does must be law, all she says gospel : oh, what a penance 
'tis to endure her ! I glad to forbear still, all to keep her 
loyal, and yet perhaps when all's done, my heir shall be 
like my horse-keeper : Fie on't ! the very thought of mar- 
riage were able to cool the hottest liver in France. 

Ehod. Well, I durst venture twice the price of your gilt 



104 ON MAHSTON, CHAPMAN, 

coney's wool, we shall have you change your copy ere a 
twelvemonth's day* 

Mug. We must have you dubb'd o' th' order ; there's 
no remedy : you that have, unmarried, done such honour- 
able service in the commonwealth, must needs receive the 
honour due to 't in marriage. 

Rhod, That he may do, and never marry. 

Z)' 01 As how, wits ? I 'faith as how ? 

Rhod. For if he can prove his father was free o' th' 
order, and that he was his father's son, then, by the laud- 
able custom of the city, he may be a cuckold by his father's 
copy, and never serve for 't. 

D'Ol Ever good, i'faith ! 

Mug, Nay, how can he plead that, when 'tis as well 
known his father died a bachelor ? 

Z)' OL Bitter, in verity, bitter ! But good still i^ its 
kind. 

Rhod. Go to, we must have you follow the lantern of 
your forefathers. 

Mug. His forefathers ? S'body, had he more fathers 
than one ? 

Z)' 01. Why, this is right : here's wit can vast out on 's 
coat, into 's jacket : the string sounds ever well, that rubs 
not too much o' th' frets : I must love you, wits, I must 
take pleasure in you. Farewell, good wits : you know my 
lodging, make an errand thither now and then, and save 
your ordinary ; do, wits, do. 

Mug. We shall be troublesome t' ye. 

D'Ol. God, sir, you wrong me, to think I can be 
troubled with wit : I love a good wit as I love myself: if, 
you need a brace or two of crowns at any time, address 
but your sonnet, it shall be as sufficient as your bond at 
all times : I carry half a score birds in a cage, shall ever 
remain at your call. Farewell, wits ; farewell, good wits. 

[Exit. 

Rhod. Farewell the true map of a gull : by heaven he 
shall to th' court .' 'tis the perfect model of an impudent 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 105 

upstart ; the compound of a poet and a lawyer ; he shall 
sure to th' court. 

Mug, Nay, for God's sake, let 's have no fools at court. 

Rhod. He shall to 't, that 's certain. The duke had a 
purpose to dispatch some one or other to the French king, 
to entreat him to send for the body of his niece, which the 
melancholy Earl of St Anne, her husband, hath kept so 
long unburied, as meaning one grave should entomb him- 
self and her together. 

Mug, A very worthy subject for an embassage, as D'O- 
live is for an ambassador agent ; and 'tis as suitable to his 
brain, as his parcel-gilt beaver to his fool's head. 

Rhod, Well, it shall go hard, but he shall be employed. 
Oh, 'tis a most accomplished ass ; the mongrel of a gull, 
and a villain : the very essence of his soul is pure villany ; 
the substance of his brain, foolery : one that believes no- 
thing from the stars upward j a pagan in belief, an epicure 
beyond belief ; prodigious in lust ; prodigal in wasteful 
expense ; in necessary, most penurious. His wit is to ad- 
mire and imitate ; his grace is to censure and detract ; he 
shall to th' court, i' faith he shall thither : I will shape such 
employment for him, as that he himself shall have no less 
contentment, in making mirth to the whole court, than 
the Duke and the whole court shall have pleasure in en- 
joying his presence. A knave, if he be rich, is fit to make 
an officer, as a fool, if he be a knave, is fit to make an 
intelligencer. [Exeunt" 

His ' May-day ^ is not so good. ^ All Fools, ^ the 
* Widow's Tears,' and ^ Eastward Hoe/ are co- 
medies of great merit, particularly the last. The 
first is borrowed a good deal from Terence, and 
the character of Valerio, an accomplished rake, 
who passes with his father for the person of the 
greatest economy and rusticity of manners, is an 
excellent idea, executed with spirit. ' Eastward 



106 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

Hoe' was written in conjunction with Ben Jon- 
son and Marston ; and for his share in it, on afj- 
cdunt of some allusions to the Scotch, just after 
the accession of James I, our author, with his 
friends, had nearly lost his ears. Such were the 
notions of poetical justice in those days ! The 
behaviour of Ben Jonson's mother on this occa- 
sion is remarkable. " On his release from prison, 
he gave an entertainment to his friends, among 
whom were Camden and Selden. In the midst 
of the entertainment, his mother, more an an- 
tique Roman than a Briton, drank to him, and 
showed him a paper of poison, which she in- 
tended to have given him in his liquor, having 
first taken a portion of it herself, if the sen- 
tence for his punishment had been executed." 
This play contains the first idea of Hogarth's 
' Idle and Industrious Apprentices.' 

It remains for me to say something of Webster 
and Decker. For these two writers I do not 
know how to show my regard and admiration 
sufficiently. Noble-minded Webster, gentle- 
hearted Decker, how may I hope to " express ye 
unblam'd," and repay to your neglected manes 
some part of the debt of gratitude I owe for proud 
and soothing recollections ? I pass by the ^ Ap- 
pius and Virginia ' of the former, which is how- 
ever a good, sensible, solid tragedy, cast in a 
frame-work of the most approved models, with 
little to blame or praise in it, except the affect- 
ing speech of Appius to Virginia just before he 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 107 

kills her ; as well as Decker's ' Wonder of a 
Kingdom/ his ' Jacomo Gentili/ that truly ideal 
character of a magnificent patron, and 'Old 
Fortimatus and his Wishing-cap/ whichlast has 
the idle garrulity of age, with the freshness and 
gaiety of youth still upon its cheek and in its 
heart. These go into the common catalogue, and 
are lost in the crowd; but Webster's ' VittoriaCo- 
I'ombona' I cannot so soon part with ; and old 
honest Decker's Siguier Orlando Friscobaldo I 
shall never forget ! I became only of late ac- 
quainted with this last-mentioned worthy cha- 
racter ; but the bargain between us is, I trust, for 
life. We sometimes regret that we had not 
sooner met with characters like these, that seem 
to raise, revive, and give a new zest to our be- 
ing. Vain the complaint ! We should never 
have known their value, if we had not known 
them always : they are old, very old acquaint- 
ance, or we should not recognise them at first 
sight. We only find in books what is already 
written within " the red-leaved tables of our 
hearts." The pregnant materials are there ; 
'^ the pangs, the internal pangs are ready ; and 
poor humanity's afflicted will struggling in vain 
with ruthless destiny." But the reading of fine 
poetry may indeed open the bleeding wounds, 
or pour balm and consolation into them, or 
sometimes even close them up for ever ! Let 
any one who has never known cruel disappoint- 
ment, nor comfortable hopes, read the first 



108 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

scene between Orlando and Hippolito, in Dec- 
ker's play of the ' Honest Whore/ and he will 
see nothing in it. But I think few persons will 
be entirely proof against such passages as some 
of the following. 

" Enter Orlando Friscobaldo. 

Omnes, Signior Friscobaldo. 

Hippolito. Friscobaldo, oh ! pray call him, and leave me ; 
we two have business. 

Carolo. Ho, Signior! Signior Friscobaldo, the Lord 
Hippolito. [Exeunt. 

Orlando. My noble Lord ! the Lord Hippolito ! The 
Duke's son ! his brave daughter's brave husband ! How 
does your honour'd Lordship? Does your nobility re- 
member so poor a gentleman as Signior Orlando Frisco- 
baldo ? old mad Orlando ? 

Hip. Oh, sir, our friends, they ought ,to be unto us as 
our jewels ; as dearly valued, being locked up and unseen, 
as when we wear them in our hands. I see, Friscobaldo, 
age hath not command of your blood ; for all Time's sickle 
hath gone over you, you are Orlando still. 

Orl. Why, my Lord, are not the fields mown and cut 
down, and stript bare, and yet wear they not pied coats 
again ? Though my head be like a leek, white, may not 
ray heart be like the blade, green ? 

Hip. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow. 
Which age hath writ there : you look youthful still. 

Orl. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart 
shall never have a wrinkle in it so long as I can cry Hem ! 
with a clear voice. * * * * 

Hip. You are the happier man, sir. 

Orl. May not old Friscobaldo, my Lord, be merry now, 
ha ? I have a little, have all things, have nothing : I 
have no wife, I have no child, have no chick, and why 
should I not be in my jocundare ? 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER, 109 

Hip. Is your wife then departed ? 
Orl. She's an old dweller in those high countries, yet 
not from me : here, she's here ; a good couple are seldom 
parted. 

Hip. You had a daughter, too, sir, had you not ? 
Orl, Oh, my Lord ! this old tree had one branch, and 
but one branch, growing out of it : it was young, it was 
fair, it was straight : I pruned it daily, drest it carefully, 
kept it from the wind, helped it to the sun ; yet for all my 
skill in planting, it grew crooked, it bore crabs : I hew'd 
it down. What's become of it I neither know nor care. 

Hip. Then can I tell you what's become of it: that 
branch is withered. 

0?7. So 'twas long ago. 

Hip. Her name, I think, was Bellafront ; she's dead. 
Orl. Ha! dead? 

Hip. Yes, what of her was left, not worth the keeping. 
Even in my sight, was thrown into a grave. 

Orl. Dead ! my last and best peace go with her I I see 
death's a good trencherman ; he can eat coarse homely 

meat as well as the daintiest Is she dead ? 

Hip. She's turn'd to earth. 

Orl. Would she were turned to heaven. Umh ! Is she 
dead ? I am glad the world has lost one of his idols : no 
whoremonger will at midnight beat at the doors : in her 
grave sleep all my shame and her own ; and all my sor- 
rows, and all her sins. 

Hip. I'm glad you are wax, not marble ; you are made 
Of man's best temper ; there are now good hopes 
That all these heaps of ice about your heart, 
By which a father's love was frozen up, 
Are thaw'd in those sweet show'rs fetch'd from your eye : 
We are ne'er like angels till our passions die. 
She is not dead, but lives under worse fate ; 
I think she's poor ; and more to clip her wings 
Her husband at this hour lies in the jail, 
For killing of a man : to save his blood, 



110 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

Join all your force with mine ; mine shall be shown, 
The getting of his life preserves your own. 

Or I. In my daughter you will say ! Does she live, 
then ? I am sorry I wasted tears upon a harlot ! but the 
best is, I have a handkerchief to drink them up, soap can 
wash them all out again. Is she poor ? 

Hip. Trust me, I think she is. 

Orl. Then she's a right strumpet. I never knew one 
of their trade rich two years together ; sieves can hold no 
water, nor harlots hoard up money: taverns, tailors, 
bawds, panders, fiddlers, swaggerers, fools, and knaves, do 
all wait upon a common harlot's trencher ; she is the gal- 
lypot to which these drones fly : not for love to the pot, 
but for the sweet sucket in it, her money, her money. 

Hip. 1 almost dare pawn my word her bosom gives 
warmth to no such snakes ; v/hen did you see her ? 

Orl. Not seventeen summers. 

Hip. Is your hate so old ? 

Orl. Older ; it has a white head, and shall never die till 
she be buried : her wrongs shall be my bedfellow. 

Hip. Work yet his life, since in it lives her fame. 

Orl. No, let him hang, and half her infamy departs out 
of the world ; I hate him for her : he taught her first to 
taste poison ; I hate her for herself, because she refused 
my physic. 

Hip. Nay, but Friscobaldo. 

Orl. I detest her, I defy both, she's not mine, she's^ 

Hip. Hear her, but speak. 

Orl. I love no mermaids, I'll not be caught with a quail- 
pipe. 

Hip* You're now beyond all reason. Is' t dotage to re- 
lieve your child, being poor ? 

Orl. 'Tis foolery ; relieve her ! Were her cold limbs 
stretcht out upon a bier, I would not sell this dirt under 
my nails to buy her an hour's breath, nor give this hair 
unless it were to choak her. 

Hip. Fare you well, for I'll trouble you no more. [Exit. 



DECKEK, AND WEBSTER. Ill 

Orl. And fare you well, sir, go thy ways ; we have few 
lords of thy making, that love wenches for their honesty. — 
*Las, my girl, art thou poor ? Poverty dwells next door 
to despair, there's but a wall between them : despair is 
one of hell's catchpoles, and lest that devil arrest her, I'll 
to her ; yet she shall not know me : she shall drink of my 
wealth as beggars do of running water, freely ; yet never 
know from what fountain's head it flows. Shall a silly bird 
pick her own breast to nourish her young ones : and can a 
father see his child starve ? That were hard : the pelican 
does it, and shall not I?" 

The rest of the character is answerable to the 
beginning. The execution is, throughout, as 
exact as the conception is new and masterly. 
There is the least colour possible used; the 
pencil drags ; the canvas is almost seen through : 
but then, what precision of outline, what truth 
and purity of tone, what firmness of hand, what 
marking of character ! The words and answers 
all along are so true and pertinent, that we seem 
to see the gestures, and to hear the tone with 
which they are accompanied. So when Orlando, 
disguised, says to his daughter, '' You'll forgive 
me,'' and she replies, '' I am not marble, I for- 
give you ;" or again, when she introduces him to 
her husband, saying simply, '^ It is my father," 
there needs no stage-direction to supply the re- 
lenting tones of voice or cordial frankness of man- 
ner with which these words are spoken. It is as 
if there were some fine art to chisel thought, 
and to embody the inmost movements of the 



112 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

mind in every-day actions and familiar speech. 
It has been asked, 

" Oh ! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind, 
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind ?" 

But this difficulty is here in a manner overcome. 
Simplicity and extravagance of style, homeliness 
and quaintnessjtragedy and comedy, interchange- 
ably set their hands and seals to this admirable 
production. We find the simplicity of prose 
with the graces of poetry. The stalk grows out 
of the ground; but the flowers spread their 
flaunting leaves in the air. The mixture of 
levity in the chief character bespeaks the bit- 
terness from which it seeks relief; it is the idle 
echo of fixed despair, jealous of observation or 
pity. The sarcasm quivers on the lip, while 
the tear stands congealed on the eye-lid. This 
'' tough senior,'' this impracticable old gentle- 
man softens into a little child ; this choke-pear 
melts in the mouth like marmalade. In spite of 
his resolute professions of misanthropy, he 
watches over his daughter with kindly solici- 
tude ; plays the careful housewife ; broods over 
her lifeless hopes , nurses the decay of her hus- 
band's fortune, as he had supported her tottering 
infancy ; saves the high-flying Matheo from the 
gallows more than once, and is twice a father to 
them. The story has all the romance of private 
life, all the pathos of bearing up against silent 



, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 113 

grief, all the tenderness of concealed affection : — 
there is much sorrow patiently borne, and then 
comes peace. Bellafront, in the two parts of this 
play taken together, is a most interesting cha- 
racter. It is an extreme, and I am afraid almost 
an ideal case. She gives the play its title, turns 
out a true penitent, that is, a practical one, and 
is the model of an exemplary wife. She seems 
intended to establish the converse of the position, 
that a reformed rake makes the best husband, 
the only difficulty in proving which, is, I suppose, 
to meet with the character. The change of her 
relative position, with regard to Hippolito, who, 
in the first part, in the sanguine enthusiasm of 
youthful generosity, has reclaimed her from vice, 
and in the second part, his own faith and love of 
virtue having been impaired with the progress 
of years, tries in vain to lure her back again to 
her former follies, has an effect the most striking 
and beautiful. The pleadings on both sides, for 
and against female faith and constancy, are ma- 
naged with great polemical skill, assisted by the 
grace and vividness of poetical illustration. As 
an instance of the manner in which Bellafront 
speaks of the miseries of her former situation, 
^' and she has felt them knowingly," I might 
give the lines in which she contrasts the diffe- 
rent regard shown to the modest or the aban- 
doned of her sex. 

" I cannot, seeing she's woven of such bad stuff, 
Set colours on a harlot bad enou 'h. 



114 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

Nothing did make me when I lov'd them best, 
To loath them more than this : when in the street 
A fair, young, modest damsel, I did meet. 
She seem'd to all a dove, when I pass'd by, 
And I to all a raven : every eye 
That followed her, went with a bashful glance ; 
At me each bold and jeering countenance 
Darted forth scorn : to her, as if she had been 
Some tower unvanquished, would they vail ; 
'Gainst me swoln rumour hoisted every sail. 
She crown'd with reverend praises, passed by them ; 
I, though with face mask'd, could not 'scape the hem ; 
For, as if heav'n had set strange marks on whores, 
Because they should be pointing- stocks to man, 
Drest up in civilest shape, a courtesan. 
Let her walk saint-like, noteless, and unknown, 
Yet she's betray'd by some trick of her own. '* 

Perhaps this sort of appeal to matter of fact 
and popular opinion, is more convincing than 
the scholastic subtleties of the Lady in ' Comus/ 
The manner too, in which Infelice, the wife of 
Hippolito, is made acquainted with her hus- 
band's infidelity, is finely dramatic ; and in the 
scene where she convicts him of his injustice by 
taxing herself with incontinence first, and then 
turning his most galling reproaches to her into 
upbraidings against his own conduct, she ac- 
quits herself with infinite spirit and address. 
The contrivance, by which, in the first part, 
after being supposed dead, she is restored to life, 
and married to Hippolito, though perhaps a little 
far-fetched, is affecting and romantic. There 
is uncommon beauty in the Duke her father's 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER, 115 

description of her sudden illness. In reply to 
Infelice's declaration on reviving, ^'I'm well," 
he says, 

" Thou wert not so e'en now. Sickness' pale hand 
Laid hold on thee, ev'n in the midst of feasting : 
And when a cup, crown'd with thy lover's health, 
Had touch'd thy lips, a sensible cold dew 
Stood on thy cheeks, as if that death had wept 
To see such beauty altered. " 

Candido, the good-natured man of this play, 
is a character of inconceivable quaintness and 
simplicity. His patience and good-humour can- 
not be disturbed by anything. The idea (for it 
is nothing but an idea) is a droll one, and is 
well supported. He is not only resigned to in- 
juries, but '' turns them," as Falstaff says of 
diseases, '^ into commodities." He is a patient 
Grizzel out of petticoats, or a Petruchio reversed. 
He is as determined upon winking at affronts, 
and keeping out of scrapes at all events, as the 
hero of the ^ Taming of the Shrew ' is bent upon 
picking quarrels out of straws, and signalizing 
his manhood without the smallest provocation 
to do so. The sudden turn of the character of 
Candido, on his second marriage, is, however, 
as amusing as it is unexpected. 

Matheo, '' the high-flying" husband of Bella- 
front, is a masterly portrait, done with equal 
ease and effect. He is a person almost without 
virtue or vice, that is, he is in strictness with- 
out any moral principle at all. He has no ma- 



116 ON MAESTON, CHAPMAN, 

lice against others, and no concern for himself. 
He is gay, profligate, and unfeeling, governed 
entirely by the impulse of the moment, and ut- 
terly reckless of consequences. His exclamation, 
when he gets a new suit of velvet, or a lucky run 
on the dice, '' Do we not fly high/' is an answer 
to all arguments. Punishment or advice has no 
more effect upon him, than upon the moth that 
flies into the candle. He is only to be left to 
his fate. Orlando saves him from it, as we do 
the moth, by snatching it out of the flame, 
throwing it out of the window, and shutting 
down the casement upon it. 

Webster would, I think, be a greater dra- 
matic genius than Decker, if he had the same 
originality ; and perhaps is so, even without it. 
His 'White Devil' and 'Duchess of Malfy,' 
upon the whole, perhaps, come the nearest to 
Shakspeare of anything we have upon record ; 
the only drawback to them, the only shade of 
imputation than can be thrown upon them, '' by 
which they lose some colour," is, that they are 
too like Shakspeare, and often direct imitations 
of him, both in general conception and indivi- 
dual expression. So far, there is nobody else 
whom it would be either so difficult or so desir- 
able to imitate; but it would have been still 
better, if all his characters had been entirely his 
own, had stood out as much from others, resting 
only on their own naked merits, as that of the 
honest Hidalgo, on whose praises I have dwelt 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 117 

SO much above* Decker has, I think, more 
truth of character, more instinctive depth of sen- 
timent, more of the unconscious simplicity of 
nature ; but he does not, out of his own stores, 
clothe his subject with the same richness of ima- 
gination, or the same glowing colours of lan- 
guage. Decker excels in giving expression to 
certain habitual, deeply-rooted feelings, which 
remain pretty much the same in all circum- 
stances, the simple uncompounded elements of 
nature and passion : — Webster gives more scope 
to their various combinations and changeable 
aspects, brings them into dramatic play by con- 
trast and comparison, flings them into a state of 
fusion by a kindled fancy, makes them describe 
a wider arc of oscillation from the impulse of 
unbridled passion, and carries both terror and 
pity to a more painful and sometimes unwar- 
rantable excess. Decker is contented with the 
historic picture of suffering ; Webster goes on 
to suggest horrible imaginings. The pathos of 
the one tells home and for itself; the other adorns 
his sentiments with some image of tender or 
awful beauty. In a word, Decker is more like 
Chaucer or Boccaccio ; as Webster's mind ap- 
pears to have been cast more in the mould of 
Shakspeare^s, as well naturally as from studious 
emulation. The Bellafront and Vittoria Co- 
rombona of these two excellent writers, show 
their different powers and turn of mind. The 
one is all softness ; the other " all fire and air." 



118 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

The faithful wife of Matheo sits at home droop- 
ing, '^ like the female dove, the whilst her golden 
couplets are disclosed ;'' while the insulted and 
persecuted Vittoria darts killing scorn and per- 
nicious beauty at her enemies. This White 
Devil (as she is called) is made fair as the 
leprosy, dazzling as the lightning. She is dressed 
like a bride in her wrongs and her revenge. In 
the trial scene in particular, her sudden indig- 
nant answers to the questions that are asked her, 
startle the hearers. Nothing can be imagined 
finer than the whole conduct and conception of 
this scene, than her scorn of her accusers and 
of herself. The sincerity of her sense of guilt 
triumphs over the hypocrisy of their affected 
and- official contempt for it. In answer to the 
charge of having received letters from the Duke 
of Brachiano, she says, 

" Grant I was tempted : — 
Condemn you me, for that the Duke did love me ? 
So may you blame some fair and crystal river, 
For that some melancholic distracted man 
Hath drov^n*d himself in 't." 

And again, when charged with being acces- 
sary to her husband's death, and showing no 
concern for it — 

" She comes not like a widow ; she comes arm'd 
With scorn and impudence. Is this a mourning habit ?** 

she coolly replies, 

" Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, 
I would have bespoke my mourning.** 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 119 

In the closing scene with her cold-blooded 
assassins, Lodovico and Gaspare, she speaks 
daggers, and might almost be supposed to exor- 
cise the murdering fiend out of these true devils. 
Every word probes to the quick. The whole 
scene is the sublime of contempt and indif- 
ference. 

** Vittoria, If Florence be i' th' Court, he would not kill me. 

Gasparo. Fool ! Princes give rewards with their own 
hands, 
But death or punishment by the hands of others. 

Lodovico (to Flamineo). Sirrah, you once did strike 
me ; I'll strike you 
Unto the centre. 

Flam. Thou 'It do it like a hangman, a base hangman, 
Not like a noble fellow ; for thou see'st 
I cannot strike again. 

Lod. Dost laugh ? 

Flam* Would'st have me die, as I was born, in whining ? 

Gasp. Recommend yourself to Heaven. 

Flam. No, I will carry mine own commendations thither. 

Lod. O ! could I kill you forty times a- day, 
And use 't four year together, 'twere too little : 
Nought grieves, but that you are too few to feed 
The famine of our vengeance. What do'st think on ? 

Flam. Nothing ; of nothing : leave thy idle questions — 
I am i' th' way to study a long silence. 
To prate were idle : I remember nothing ; 
There's nothing of so infinite vexation 
As man's own thoughts. 

Lod. O thou glorious strumpet ! 
Could I divide thy breath from this pure air 
When 't leaves thy body, I would suck it up. 
And breathe 't upon some dunghill. 



120 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

Vit, Cor, You my death 's-man ! 
Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough ; 
Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman : 
If thou be, do thy office in right form ; 
Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness. 

Lod, O ! thou hast been a most prodigious comet ; 
But I'll cut off your train : kill the Moor first. 

Vit, Cor. You shall not kill her first ; behold my breast ; 
I will be waited on in death : my servant 
Shall never go before me. 
Gasp. Are you so brave ? 
Vit. Cor, Yes, I shall welcome death 
As princes do some great embassadours ; 
I'll meet thy weapon half way. 

Lod. Thou dost not tremble ! 
Methinks, fear should dissolve thee into air. 

Vit. Cor. O, thou art deceived, I am too true a woman ! 
Conceit can never kill me. 1*11 tell thee what, 
I will not in my death shed one base tear ; 
Or if look pale, for want of blood, not fear. 

Gasp. ( To Zanche). Thou art my task, black fury. 
Zanche. I have blood 
As red as either of theirs ! Wilt drink some ? 
'Tis good for the falling sickness : I am proud 
Death cannot alter my complexion, 
For I shall ne'er look pale. 

Lod. Strike, strike, 
With a joint motion. 

Vit. Cor. 'Twas a manly blow : 
The next thou givest, murther some sucking infant, 
And then thou wilt be famous.'* 

Such are some of the terrible graces of the ob- 
scure, forgotten Webster. There are other parts 
of this play of a less violent, more subdued, and, 
if it were possible, even deeper character ; such 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 121 

is the declaration of divorce pronounced by 
Brachiano on his wife : 

" Your hand I'll kiss : 
This is the latest ceremony of my love ; 
I'll never more live with you,*' &c. 

which is in the manner of, and equal to. Decker's 
finest things : — and others, in a quite different 
style of fanciful poetry and bewildered passion ; 
such as the lamentation of Cornelia, his mother, 
for the death of Marcello, and the parting scene 
of Brachiano ; which would be as fine as Shak- 
speare, if they were not in a great measure bor- 
rowed from his inexhaustible store. In the for- 
mer, after Flamineo has stabbed his brother, 
and Hortensio comes in, Cornelia exclaims, 

" Alas ! he is not dead ; he's in a trance. 
Why, here's nobody shall get anything by his death ; 
Let me call him again, for God's sake. 

Hor, I would you vrere deceived. 

Corn. O you abuse me, you abuse me, you abuse me - 
How many have gone away thus, for lack of 'tendance? 
Rear up 's head, rear up 's head ; his bleeding inward will 
kill him. 

Hor, You see he is departed. 

Corn. Let me come to him ; give me him as he is. If 
he be turned to earth, let me but give him one hearty kiss, 
and you shall put us both into one coffin. Fetch a look- 
ing-glass : see if his breath will not stain it ; or pull out 
some feathers from my pillow, and lay them to his lips. 
Will you lose him for a little pains-taking ? 

Hor. Your kindest office is to pray for him. 

Corn, Alas ! I would not pray for him yet. He may 



122 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

live to lay me i* th' ground, and pray for me, if you'll let 
me come to him. 

Enter Brachiano, all armed, save the Bearer, with Flamineo 
and Page, 

Brach, Was this your handy- work ? 

Flam, It was my misfortune. 

Corn, He lies, he lies ; he did not kill him. These have 
killed him, that would not let him be better looked to. 

Brach. Have comfort my grieved mother. 

Corn, O, yon screech-owl ! 

Hor, Forbear, good madam. 

Corn, Let me go, let me go. 

(She runs to Flamineo with her hnife drawn, and 
coming to him, lets it fall, ) 

The God of Heaven forgive thee ! Dost not wonder 
I pray for thee ? I'll tell thee what's the reason : 
I have scarce breath to number twenty minutes ; 
I'd not spend that in cursing. Fare thee well ! 
Half of thyself lies there ; and may'st thou live 
To fill an hour-glass with his moulder'd ashes, 
To tell how thou should'st spend the time to come 
In blest repentance. 

Brach. Mother, pray tell me, 
How came he by his death ? What was the quarrel ? 

Corn. Indeed, my younger boy presumed too much 
Upon his manhood, gave him bitter words. 
Drew his sword first ; and so, I know not how, 
For I was out of my wits, he fell with 's head 
Just in my bosom. 

Page. This is not true, madam. 

Corn. I pr'ythee, peace. 
One arrow's grazed already : it were vain 
To lose this ; for that will ne'er be found again." 

This is a good deal borrowed from Lear ; but 
the inmost folds of the human heart, the sudden 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 123 

turns and windings of the fondest affection, are 
also laid open with so masterly and original a 
hand, that it seems to prove the occasional imi- 
tations as unnecessary as they are evident. The 
scene where the Duke discovers that he is poi- 
soned, is as follows, and equally fine. 

^^ Brack. Oh ! I am gone already. The infection 
Flies to the brain and heart. O, thou strong heart, 
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and thee, 
They're loth to part. 

Giovanni. O my most lov'd father ! 

Brack. Remove the boy away : 
Where's this good woman ? Had I infinite worlds, 
They were too little for thee. Must I leave thee ? 

{To Vittoria.) 
What say you, screech-owls. ( To the Pkysicians. ) Is the 
venom mortal ? 

Phy. Most deadly. 

Brack. Most corrupted politic hangman ! 
You kill without book ; but your art to save 
Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends : 
I that have given life to offending slaves. 
And wretched murderers, have I not power 
To lengthen mine own a twelve-month ? 
Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee. 
This unction is sent from the great Duke of Florence. 

Francesco de Medici (in disguise). Sir, be of comfort. 

Brack. O thou soft natural death ! that art joint-twin 
To sweetest slumber ! — no rough-bearded comet 
Stares on thy mild departure : the dull owl 
Beats not against thy casement : the hoarse wolf 
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse, 
WTiilst horror waits on princes. 
Vit. Cor. I am lost for ever. 

Brack. How miserable a thing it is to die 
'Mongst women howling ! What are those ? 



124 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN^ 

Flam. Franciscans. 
They have brought the extreme unction. 

Brack, On pain of death, let no man name death to me : 
It is a word most infinitely terrible. 
Withdraw into our cabinet.'* 

The deception practised upon him by Lodo- 
vico and Gasparo, who offer him the sacrament 
in the disguise of Monks, and then discover 
themselves to damn him, is truly diabolical and 
ghastly. But the genius that suggested it was 
as profound as it was lofty. When they are at 
first introduced, Flamineo says, 

" See, see how firmly he doth fix his eye 
Upon the Crucifix." 

To which Vittoria answers, 

" Oh, hold it constant : 
It settles his wild spirits ; and so his eyes 
Melt into tears." 

The Duchess of Malfy is not, in my judg- 
ment, quite so spirited or effectual a performance 
as the White Devil. But it is distinguished by 
the same kind of beauties, clad in the same ter- 
rors. I do not know but the occasional strokes 
of passion are even profounder and more Shak- 
sperian; but the story is more laboured, and 
the horror is accumulated to an overpowering 
and insupportable height. However appalling 
to the imagination and finely done, the scenes of 
the madhouse to which the Duchess is con- 
demned with a view to unsettle her reason, and 
the interview between her and her brother, 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 125 

where he gives her the supposed dead hand of 
her husband, exceed, to my thinking, the just 
bounds of poetry and of tragedy. At least, the 
merit is of a kind which, however great, we 
wish to be rare. A series of such exhibitions 
obtruded upon the senses or the imagination 
must tend to stupefy and harden, rather than to 
exalt the fancy or meliorate the heart. I speak 
this under correction 5 but I hope the objection 
is a venial common-place. In a different style 
altogether are the directions she gives about her 
children in her last struggles ; 

" I pr'ythee, look thou giv'st my little boy 
Some syrop for his cold, and let the girl 
Say her pray'rs ere she sleep. Now what death you 
please — " 

and her last word, ^' Mercy," which she recovers 
just strength enough to pronounce; her proud 
answer to her tormentors, who taunt her with 
her degradation and misery — "^ But I am 
Duchess of Malfy still '^* — as if the heart rose 
up, like a serpent coiled, to resent the indignities 
put upon it, and being struck at, struck again ; 

* " Am I not the Duchess ? 

Bosola. Thou art some great woman, sure ; for riot 
begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in grey hairs) twenty 
years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleep'st 
worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up his 
lodging in a cat's ear : a little infant that breeds its teeth, 
should it Ue with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the 
more unquiet bed-fellow. 

Dach. I am Duchess of Malfy still." 



126 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

and the staggering reflection her brother makes 
on her death, '^ Cover her face: my eyes dazzle: 
she died young !" Bosola replies : 
" I think not so ; her infelicity 
Seem'd to have years too many. 

Ferdinand. She and I were twins : 
And should I die this instant, I had liv'd 
Her time to a minute." 

This is not the bandying of idle words and 
rhetorical common-places, but the writhing and 
conflict, and the sublime colloquy of man's 
nature with itself ! 

The ' Revenger's Tragedy,' by Cyril Tourneur, 
is the only other drama equal to these and to 
Shakspeare, in '^ the dazzling fence of impas- 
sioned argument," in pregnant illustration, and 
in those profound reaches of thought, which 
lay open the soul of feeling. The play, on the 
whole, does not answer to the expectations it 
excites ; but the appeals of Castiza to her mo- 
ther, who endeavours to corrupt her virtuous re- 
Lolutions, '^ Mother, come from that poisonous 
woman there," with others of the like kind, are 
of as high and abstracted an essence of poetry, 
as any of those above mentioned. 

In short, the great characteristic of the elder 
dramatic writers is, that there is nothing thea- 
trical about them. In reading them you only 
think how the persons, into whose mouths cer- 
tain sentiments are put, would have spoken or 
looked : in reading Dryden and others of that 



DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 127 

school, you only think, as the authors them- 
selves seem to have done, how they would be 
ranted on the stage by some buskined hero or 
tragedy-queen. In this respect, indeed, some of 
his more obscure contemporaries have the ad- 
vantage over Shakspeare himself, inasmuch as 
we have never seen their works represented 
on the stage ; and there is no stage-trick to re- 
mind us of it. The characters of their heroes 
have not been cut down to fit into the prompt- 
book, nor have we ever seen their names flaring 
in the play-bills in small or large capitals. — I do 
not mean to speak disrespectfully of the stage ; 
but I think higher still of nature, and next to that 
of books. They are tlie nearest to our thoughts : 
they wind into the heart ; the poet*s verse slides 
into the current of our blood. We read them when 
young, we remember them when old. We read 
there of what has happened to others ; we feel 
that it has happened to ourselves. They are to be 
had everywhere cheap and good. We breathe 
but the air of books : we owe everything to their 
authors, on this side barbarism; and we pay 
them easily with contempt, while living, and 
with an epitaph, when dead ! Michael Angelo is 
beyond the Alps; Mrs Siddons has left the 
stage and us to mourn her loss. Were it not so, 
there are neither picture-galleries nor theatres- 
royal on Salisbury-plain, where I write this ; 
but here, even here, with a few old authors, I 
can manage to get through the summer or the 



128 ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, 

winter months, without ever knowing what it is 
to feel enjiui. They sit with me at breakfast ; 
they walk out with me before dinner. After ^ 
long walk through unfrequented tracts, after 
starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the 
wing of the raven rustling above my head, or 
being greeted by the woodman's ^' stern good- 
night," as he strikes into his narrow homeward 
pathj I can " take mine ease at mine inn,'' beside 
the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signer 
Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance 
I have. Ben Jonson, learned Chapman, Mas- 
ter Webster, and Master Heywood, ai*e there ; 
and seated round, discourse the silent hours 
away. Shakspeare is there himself, not in Gib- 
ber's manager's coat. Spenser is hardly yet 
returned from a ramble through the woods, or is 
concealed behind a group of nymphs, fawns, and 
satyrs. Milton lies on the table, as on an altar, 
never taken up or laid down without reverence. 
Lyly's Endymion sleeps with the Moon, that 
shines in at the window ; and a breath of wind 
stirring at a distance seems a sigh from the tree 
under which he grew old. Faustus disputes in 
one corner of the room with fiendish faces, and 
reasons of divine astrology. Bellafront soothes 
Matheo, Vittoria triumphs over her judges, and 
old Chapman repeats one of the hymns of Ho- 
mer, in his own fine translation ! I should have 
no objection to pass my life in this manner out 
of the world, not thinking of it, nor it of me y 



DECKER^ AND WEBSTER. 129 

neither abused by my enemies, nor defended by 
my friends; careless of the future, but sometimes 
dreaming of the past, which might as well be 
forgotten ! Mr Wordsworth has expressed this 
sentiment well (perhaps I have borrowed it from 
him) — 

" Books, dreams, are both a world ; and books, we know, 
Are a substantial world, both pure and good, 
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness may grow. 

****** 
Two let me mention dearer than the rest, 
The gentle lady wedded to the Moor, 
And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb. 

Blessings be with them and eternal praise. 
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight in deathless lays. 
Oh, might my name be number'd among theirs, 
Then gladly would I end my mortal days !" 

I have no sort of pretension to join in the con- 
cluding wish of the last stanza ; but I trust the 
writer feels that this aspiration of his early and 
highest ambition is already not unfulfilled ! 



LECTURE IV. 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, 
FORD, AND MASSINGER. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, with all their pro- 
digious merits, appear to me the first writers 
who in some measure departed from the genuine 
tragic style of the age of Shakspeare. They 
thought less of their subject, and more of them- 
selves, than some others. They had a great and 
unquestioned command over the stores both of 
fancy and passion ; but they availed themselves 
too often of common-place extravagances and 
theatrical trick. Men at first produce effect by- 
studying nature, and afterwards they look at 
nature only to produce effect. It is the same 
in the history of other arts, and of other periods 
of literature. With respect to most of the writers 
of this age, their subject was their master, 
Shakspeare was alone, as I have said before, 
master of his subject; but Beaumont and Flet- 
cher were the first who made a play-thing of it, 
or a convenient vehicle for the display of their 
own powers. The example of preceding or con- 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, ETC. 131 

temporary writers had given them facility ; the 
frequency of dramatic exhibition had advanced 
the popular taste ; and this facility of produc- 
tion, and the necessity for appealing to popular 
applause, tended to vitiate their own taste, and 
to make them willing to pamper that of tbfj 
public for novelty and extraordinary effect. 
There wants something of the sincerity and 
modesty of the older writers. They do not wait 
nature's time, or work out her materials patiently 
and faithfully, but try to anticipate her, and so 
far defeat themselves. They would have a catas- 
trophe in every scene ; so that you have none 
at last : they would raise admiration to its height 
in every line ; so that the impression of the whole 
is comparatively loose and desultory. They 
pitch the characters at first in too high a key, 
and exhaust themselves by the eagerness and 
impatience of their efibrts. We find all the 
prodigality of youth, the confidence inspired by 
success, an enthusiasm bordering on extrava- 
gance, richness running riot, beauty dissolving 
in its own sweetness. They are like heirs jast 
come to their estates, like lovers in the honey- 
moon. In the economy of nature's gifts they 
" misuse the bounteous Pan, and thank the Gods 
amiss.'' Their productions shoot up in haste, 
but bear the marks of precocity and premature 
decay. Or they are two goodly trees, the 
stateliest of the forest, crowned with blossoms, 
and with the verdure springing at their ieeiy 



V 



132 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

but they do not strike their roots far enough 
into the ground, and the fruit can hardly ripen 
for the flowers 1 

It cannot be denied that they are lyrical and 
descriptive poets of the highest order; every 
page of their writings is ^Jlorilegium : they are 
dramatic poets of the second class, in point of 
knowledge, variety, vivacity, and effect ; there 
is hardly a passion, character, or situation, 
which they have not touched in their devious 
range, and whatever they touched they adorned 
with some new grace or striking feature : they 
are masters of style and versification in almost 
every variety of melting modulation or sounding 
pomp, of which they are capable : in comic wit 
and spirit, they are scarcely surpassed by any 
writers of any age. There they are in their ele- 
ment, " like eagles newly baited ;" but I speak 
rather of their serious poetry; and this, I ap- 
prehend, with all its richness, sweetness, lofti- 
ness, and grace, wants something — stimulates 
more than it gratifies, and leaves the mind 
in a certain sense exhausted and unsatisfied. 
Their fault is a too ostentatious and indiscrimi- 
nate display of power. Everything seems in 
a state of fermentation and effervescence, and 
not to have settled and found its centre in 
their minds. The ornaments, through neglect 
or abundance, do not always appear suffi- 
ciently appropriate : there is evidently a rich 
wardrobe of words and images, to set off* 



BEN JONSON, FORD, ANB MASSINCJER. 133 

any sentiments that occur, but not equal felicity 
in the choice of the sentiments to be expressed ; 
the characters in general do not take a substan- 
tial form, or excite a growing interest, or leave 
a permanent impression ; the passion does not 
accumulate by the force of time, of circum- 
stances, and habit, but wastes itself in the first 
ebullitions of surprise and novelty. 

Besides these more critical objections, there 
is a too frequent mixture of voluptuous softness 
or effeminacy of character with horror in the 
subjects, a conscious weakness (I ean hardly 
think it wantonness) of moral constitution strug- 
gling with wilful and violent situations, like the 
tender wings of the moth, attracted to the flame 
that dazzles and consumes it. In the hey-day 
of their youthful ardour, and the intoxication of 
their animal spirits, they take a perverse delight 
in tearing up some rooted sentiment, to make a 
mawkish lamentation over it ; and fondly and 
gratuitously cast the seeds of crimes into forbid- 
den grounds, to see how they will shoot up and 
vegetate into luxuriance, to catch the eye of 
fancy. They are not safe teachers of morality : 
they tamper with it, like an experiment tried in 
corpore vili; and seem to regard the decompo- 
sition of the common affections, and the dissolu- 
tion of the strict bonds of society, as an agreeable 
study and a careless pastime. The tone of Shak- 
speare's writings is manly and bracing ; theirs 
is at once insipid and meretricious, in the com- 



134 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

parison. Shakspeare never disturbs the grounds 
of moral principle ; but leaves his characters 
(after doing them heaped justice on all sides) 
to be judged of by our common sense and 
natural feelings Beaumont and Fletcher con- 
stantly bring in equivocal sentiments and charac- 
ters, as if to set them up to be debated by 
sophistical casuistry, or varnished over with the 
colours of poetical ingenuity. Or Shakspeare 
may be said to '^ cast the diseases of the mind, 
only to restore it to a sound and pristine health :'' 
the dramatic paradoxes of Beaumont and Flet- 
cher are, to all appearance, tinctured with an 
infusion of personal vanity and laxity of princi- 
ple. I do not say that this was the character of 
the men ; but it strikes me as the character of 
their minds. The two things are very distinct. 
The greatest purists (hypocrisy apart) are often 
free livers ; and some of the most unguarded 
professors of a general licence of behaviour, have 
been the last persons to take the benefit of their 
own doctrine, from which they reap nothing, 
but the obloquy, and the pleasure of startling 
their '^ wonder- wounded " hearers. There is a 
division of labour, even in vice. Some persons 
addict themselves to the speculation only, others 
to the practice. The peccant humours of the 
body or the mind break out in different ways. 
One man sows his wild oats in his neighbour's 
field : another on Mount Parnassus ; from 
whence, borne on the breath of fame, they may 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 135 

hope to spread and fructify to distant times and 
regions. Of the latter class were our poets, 
who, I believe, led unexceptionable lives, and 
only indulged their imaginations in occasional 
unwarrantable liberties with the Muses. What 
makes them more inexcusable, and confirms this 
charge against them, is, that they are always 
' abusing " wanton poets," as if willing to shift 
suspicion from themselves. 

Beaumont and Fletcher were the first, also, 
who laid the foundation of the artificial diction 
and tinselled pomp of the next generation of 
poets, by aiming at a profusion of ambitious 
ornaments, and by translating the commonest 
circumstances into the language of metaphor and 
passion. It is this misplaced and inordinate 
craving after striking effect and continual ex- 
citement that had at one time rendered our 
poetry the most vapid of all things, by not leav- 
ing the moulds of poetic diction to be filled up 
by the overflowings of nature and passion, but 
by swelling out ordinary and unmeaning topics 
to certain preconceived and indispensable stan 
dards of poetical elevation and grandeur. — 1 
shall endeavour to confirm this praise, mixed 
with unwilling blame, by remarking on a few of 
their principal tragedies. If I have done them 
injustice, the resplendent passages I have to 
quote will set everything to rights. 

The * Maid's Tragedy' is one of the poorest. 
The nature of the distress is of the most disa- 



136 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

greeable and repulsive kind ; and not the less so 
because it is entirely improbable and uncalled 
for. There is no sort of reason, or no sufficient 
reason to the reader's mind, why the king should 
marry off his mistress to one of his courtiers, 
why he should pitch upon the worthiest for this 
purpose, why he should, by such a choice, break 
off Amintor's match with the sister of another 
principal support of his throne (whose death is 
the consequence), why he should insist on the 
inviolable fidelity of his former mistress to him 
after she is married, and why her husband should 
thus inevitably be made acquainted with his 
dishonour, and roused to madness and revenge, 
except the mere love of mischief and gratui- 
tous delight in torturing the feelings of others, 
and tempting one's own fate. The character of 
Evadne, however, her naked, unblushing impu- 
dence, the mixture of folly with vice, her utter 
insensibility to any motive but her own pride 
and inclination, her heroic superiority to any 
signs of shame or scruples of conscience from a 
recollection of what is due to herself or others, 
are well described, and the lady is true to her- 
self in her repentance, which is owing to nothing 
but the accidental impulse and whim of the 
moment. The deliberate, voluntary disregard of 
all moral ties and all pretence to virtue, in the 
structure of the fable, is nearly unaccountable. 
Amintor (who is meant to be the hero of the 
piece) is a feeble, irresolute character : his slav- 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 137 

ish, recanting loyalty to his prince, who has 
betrayed and dishonoured him, is of a piece 
with the tyranny and insolence of which he is 
made the sport ; and even his tardy revenge is 
snatched from his hands, and he kills his former 
betrothed and beloved mistress, instead of exe- 
cuting vengeance on the man who has destroyed 
his peace of mind and unsettled her intellects. 
The king, however, meets his fate from the 
penitent fury of Evadne ; and on this account, 
the ' Maid's Tragedy ^ was forbidden to be acted 
in the reign of Charles II, as countenancing the 
doctrine of regicide. Aspatia is a beautiful 
sketch of resigned and heart-broken melan- 
choly ; and Calianax, a blunt, satirical courtier, 
is a character of much humour and novelty. 
There are striking passages here and there, but 
fewer than in almost any of their plays. Amin- 
tor's speech to Evadne, when she makes confes- 
sion of her unlooked-for remorse, is, I think, 
the finest. 



" Do not mock me : 



Though I am tame, and bred up with my wrongs, 
Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap, 
Like a hand- wolf, into my natural wildness. 
And do an outrage. Prithee, do not mock me ! " 

' King and No King,^ which is on a strangely 
chosen subject as strangely treated, is very 
superior in power and effect. There is an unex- 
pected reservation in the plot, which, in some 
measure, relieves the painfulness of the impi-es- 



138 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

sion. Arbaces is painted in gorgeous, but not 
alluring colours^ His vain-glorious pretensions 
and impatience of contradiction are admirably 
displayed, and are so managed as to produce an 
involuntary comic effect to temper the lofty tone 
of tragedy, particularly in the scenes in which 
he affects to treat his vanquished enemy with 
such condescending kindness ; and perhaps this 
display of upstart pride was meant by the 
authors as an oblique satire on his low origin, 
which is afterwards discovered. His pride of 
self-will and fierce impetuosity are the same 
in war and in love. The haughty voluptuous- 
ness and pampered effeminacy of his character 
admit neither respect for his misfortunes, nor 
pity for his errors. His ambition is a fever in 
the blood ; and his love is a sudden transport of 
ungovernable caprice that brooks no restraint, 
and is intoxicated with the lust of power, even 
in the lap of pleasure, and the sanctuary of the 
affections. The passion of Panthea is, as it 
were, a reflection from, and lighted at the 
shrine of her lover's flagrant vanity. In the 
elevation of his rank, and in the consciousness 
of his personal accomplishments, he seems firm- 
ly persuaded (and by sympathy to persuade 
others) that there is nothing in the world 
which can be an object of liking or admira- 
tion but himself. The first birth and decla- 
ration of this perverted sentiment to himself, 
when he meets with Panthea after his return 



BEN JONSON, FORD AND MASSINGER. 139 

from conquest, fostered by his presumptuous 
infatuation and the heat of his inflammable pas- 
sions, and the fierce and lordly tone in which 
he repels the suggestion of the natural ob- 
stacles to his sudden phrenzy, are in Beau- 
mont and Fletcher's most daring manner ; but 
the rest is not equal. What may be called the 
love scenes are equally gross and common- 
place ; and instead of any thing like delicacy 
or a struggle of different feelings, have all the 
indecency and familiarity of a brothel. Bes- 
sus, a comic character in this play, is a swag- 
gering coward, something between Parolles 
and Falstaff. 

The * False One' is an indirect imitation of 
Antony and Cleopatra. We have Septimius 
for CEnobarbus, and Caesar for Antony, Cleo- 
patra herself is represented in her girlish state, 
but she is made divine in 

" Youth that opens like perpetual spring," 

and promises the rich harvest of love and plea- 
sure that succeeds it. Her first presenting 
herself before Caesar, when she is brought in 
by Sceva, and the impression she makes upon 
him, like a vision dropped from the clouds, or 
" Like some celestial sweetness, the treasure of soft love," 

are exquisitely conceived. Photinus is an ac- 
complished villain, well-read in crooked policy 
and quirks of state; and the description of 
Pompey has a solemnity and grandeur worthy 



140 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEtl, 

of his unfortunate end. Septimius says, bring- 
ing in his lifeless head, 

" 'Tis here, 'tis done ! Behold you fearful viewers, 
Shake, and behold the model of the world here. 
The pride and strength ! Look, look again, 'tis finished ! 
That that whole armies, nay, whole nations, 
Many and mighty kings, have been struck blind at, 
And fled before, wing'd with their fears and terrors, 
That steel War waited on, and fortune courted. 
That high-plum'd Honour built up for her own ; 
Behold that mightiness, behold that fierceness. 
Behold that child of war, with all his glories. 
By this poor hand made breathless !'' 

And again Caesar says of him, who was his 
mortal enemy (it was not held in the fashion in 
those days, nor will it be held so in time to 
come, to lampoon those whom you have van- 
quished) — 

" Oh, thou conqueror, 

Thou glory of the world once, now the pity. 
Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus ? 
What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on 
To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian ? 
The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger, 
That honourable war ne*er taught a nobleness. 
Nor worthy circumstance shew'd what a man was? 
That never heard thy name sung but in banquets, 
And loose lascivious pleasures ? — to a boy. 
That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness, 
No study of thy life to know thy goodness ? 
Egyptians, do you think your highest pyramids. 
Built to outdure the sun, as you suppose. 
Where your unworthy kings lie raked in ashes. 
Are monuments fit for him ! No, brood of Nilus, 
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven ; 



BEN JONSON5 FORD, AND MASSINGER, 141 

No pyramids set off his memories, 

But the eternal substance of his greatness, 

To which I leave him." 

It is something worth living for, to write or 
even read such poetry as this is, or to know 
that it has been written, or that there have been 
subjects on which to write it ! — This, of all 
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, comes the near- 
est in style and manner to Shakspeare, not except- 
ing the first act of the ' Two Noble Kinsmen,' 
which has been sometimes attributed to him. 

The ' Faithful Shepherdess,' by Fletcher 
alone, is '^ a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, 
where no crude surfeit reigns." The author 
has in it given a loose to his fancy, and his 
fancy was his most delightful and genial quality, 
where, to use his own words, 

" He takes most ease, and grows ambitious 
Thro' his own wanton fire and pride delicious " 

The songs and lyrical descriptions throughout 
are luxuriant and delicate in a high degree. He 
came near to Spenser in a certain tender and 
voluptuous sense of natural beauty ; he came 
near to Shakspeare in the playful and fantastic 
expression of it. The whole composition is an 
exquisite union of dramatic and pastoral poetry ; 
where the local descriptions receive a tincture 
from the sentiments and purposes of the speaker, 
and each character, cradled in the lap of nature, 
paints " her virgin fancies wild" with romantic 
grace and classic elegance. 



142 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

The place and its employments are thus de- 
scribed by Chloe to Thenot : 

" Here be woods as green 



As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet 
As where smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet 
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many 
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any ; 
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells. 
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine ; caves, and dells ; 
Chuse where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing, 
Or gather rushes, to make many a ring 
For thy long fingers ; tell thee tales of love, 
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, 
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes 
She took eternal fire that never dies ; 
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep. 
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep 
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night. 
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, 
To kiss her sweetest." 

There are few things that can surpass in 
truth and beauty of allegorical description the 
invocation of Amaryllis to the God of Shep- 
herds, Pan, to save her from the violence of the 
Sullen Shepherd, for Syrinx' sate : 

" For her dear sake. 



That loves the rivers' brinks, and still doth shake 
In cold remembrance of thy quick pursuit !" 

Or again, the friendly Satyr promises 
Clorin — 

" Brightest, if there be remaining 
Any service, without feigning 
I will do it ; were I set 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 143 

To catch the nimble wind, or get 
Shadows gliding on the green." 
It would be a task no less difficult than this, to 
follow the flight of the poet's Muse, or catch 
her fleeting graces, fluttering her golden wings, 
and singing in notes angelical of youth, of love, 
and joy ! 

There is only one affected and ridiculous cha- 
racter in this drama, that of Thenot in love with 
Clorin. He is attached to'her for her invio- 
lable fidelity to her buried husband, and wishes 
her not to grant his suit, lest it should put an 
end to his passion. Thus he pleads to her 
against himself : — 

" If you yield, I die 

To all affection : 'tis that loyalty 
You tie unto this grave I so admire ; 
And yet there's something else I would desire, 
If you would hear me, but withal deny. 
Oh Pan, what an uncertain destiny 
Hangs over all my hopes ! I will retire ; 
For if I longer stay, this double fire 
Will lick my life up." 
This is paltry quibbling. It is spurious logic, 
not genuine feeling. A pedant may hang his 
aff'ections on the point of a dilemma in this 
manner ; but nature does not sophisticate : or 
when she does, it is to gain her ends, not to de- 
feat them. 

The Sullen Shepherd turns out too dark a 
character in the end, and gives a shock to the 
gentle and pleasing sentiments inspired through- 
out. 



144 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

^ The resemblance of Comus to this poem is 
not so great as has been sometimes contended, 
nor are the particular allusions important or 
frequent. Whatever Milton copied, he made 
his own. In reading the Faithful Shepherdess, 
we find ourselves breathing the moonlight air 
under the cope of heaven, and wander by forest 
side or fountain, among fresh dews and flowers, 
followmg our vagrant fancies, or smit with the 
love of nature's works. In reading Milton's 
Comus, and most of his other works, we seem 
to be entering a lofty dome raised over our 
heads and ascending to the skies, and as if Na- 
ture and everything in it were but a temple and 
an image consecrated by the poet's art to the 
worship of virtue and true religion. The speech 
of Clorin, after she has been alarmed by the 
Satyr, is the only one of which Milton has made 
a free use. 

" And all my fears go with thee. 

"What greatness or what private hidden power 

Is there in me to draw submission 

From this rude man and beast ? Sure I am mortal : 

The daughter of a shepherd ; he was mortal, 

And she that bore me mortal ; prick my hand, 

And it will bleed, a fever shakes me, and 

The self same wind that makes the young lambs shrink. 

Makes me a-cold : my fear says, I am mortal. 

Yet I have heard (my mother told it me, 

And now I do believe it), if I keep 

My virgin flow'r uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair, 

No goblin, wood-god, fairy, elf, or fiend. 

Satyr, or other power that haunts the groves, , 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 145 

Shall hurt my body, or by vain illusion 

Draw me to wander after idle fires ; 

Or voices calling me in dead of night 

To make me follow, and so tole me on 

Thro* mire and standing pools to find my ruin ; 

Else, why should this rough thing, who never knew 

Manners, nor smooth humanity, whose heats 

Are rougher than himself, and more misshapen. 

Thus mildly kneel to me ? Sure there 's a pow'r 

In that great name of Virgin, that binds fast 

All rude uncivil bloods, all appetites 

That break their confines : then, strong Chastity 1 

Be thou my strongest guard, for here I '11 dwell 

In opposition against fate and hell ! " 

Ben Jonson's ' Sad Shepherd ^ comes nearer it 
in style and spirit, but still with essential differ- 
ences, like the two men, and without any ap- 
pearance of obligation. Ben's is more homely 
and grotesque. Fletcher's is more visionary 
and fantastical. I hardly know which to pre- 
fer. If Fletcher has the advantage in general 
power and sentiment, Jonson is superior in 
naivete and truth of local colouring. 

The ' Two Noble Kinsmen ' is another mo- 
nument of Fletcher's genius ; and it is said also 
of Shakspeare's. The style of the first act has 
certainly more weight, more abruptness, and 
more involution, than the general style of 
Fletcher, with fewer softenings and fillings-up 
to sheathe the rough projecting points and piece 
the disjointed fragments together. For example, 
the compliment of Theseus to one of the Queens, 
that Hercules 



146 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

" Tumbled him down upon his Nemean hide, 
And swore his sinews thaw'd " 

at sight of her beauty, is in a bolder and more 
masculine vein than Fletcher usually aimed at. 
Again, the supplicating address of the distressed 
Queen to Hippolita, 

" Lend us a knee : 

But touch the ground for us no longer time 

Than a dove's motion, when the head's pluck'd oflP" — 

is certainly in the manner of Shakspeare, with 
his subtlety and strength of illustration. But, 
on the other hand, in what immediately follows, 
relating to their husbands left dead in the field 
of battle, 

" Tell him if he i' th' blood-siz'd field lay swoln, 
Shewing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, 
What you would do " — 

I think we perceive the extravagance of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, not contented with truth or 
strength of description, but hurried p.way by the 
love of violent excitement into an image of dis- 
gust and horror, not called for, and not at all 
proper in the mouth into which it is put. There 
is a studied exaggeration of the sentiment, and 
an evident imitation of the parenthetical inter- 
ruptions and breaks in the line, corresponding 
to what we sometimes meet in Shakspeare, as in 
the speeches of Leontes in ^ The Winter's Tale ;' 
but the sentiment is overdone, and the style 
merely mechanical. Thus Hippolita declares, 
on her lord's going to the wars, 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 147 

*' We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep, 
When our friends don their helms, or put to sea, 
Or tell of babes broach'd on the lance, or women 
That have seethed their infants in (and after eat them) 
The brine they wept at killing 'em ; then if 
You stay to see of us such spinsters, we 
Should hold you here for ever." 

One might apply to this sort of poetry what 
Marvel, says of some sort of passions, that it is 
" Tearing our pleasures with rough strife 
Through the iron gates of life." 

It is not in the true spirit of Shakspeare, who 
was " born only heir to all humanity/' whose 
horrors were not gratuitous, and who did not 
harrow up the feelings for the sake of making 
mere bravura speeches. There are also in this 
first act several repetitions of Shakspeare's 
phraseology ; a thing that seldom or never oc- 
curs in his own works. For instance, 

" Past slightly 

His careless execution"'-^ 
" The very lees of such, millions of rates 
Exceed the wine of others " — 

" Let the event. 
That never-erring arbitrator, tell us " — 
" Like old importmenfs bastard " — 

There are also words that are never used by 
Shakspeare in a similar sense : — 

-" All our surgeons 

Convent in their behoof " — 

" We convent nought else but woes. " 

In short, it appears to me that the first part of 



148 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

this play was written in imitation of Shakspeare's 
manner, but I see no reason to suppose that it 
was his, but the common tradition, which is 
by no means well established. The subsequent 
acts are confessedly Fletcher's, and the imitations 
of Shakspeare which occur there (not of Shaks- 
peare's manner as differing from his, but as it was 
congenial to his own spirit and feeling of nature) 
are glorious in themselves, and exalt our idea 
of the great original which could give birth to 
such magnificent conceptions in another. The 
conversation of Palamon and Arcite in prison 
is of this description — the outline is evidently 
taken from that of Guiderius, Arviragus, and 
Bellarius, in ' Cymbelline,' but filled up with a 
rich profusion of graces that make it his own 
again. 

" Pal. How do you, noble cousin ? 
Arc. How do you, Sir? 
Pal. Why, strong enough to laugh at misery, 
And bear the chance of war yet. We are prisoners, 
I fear for ever, cousin. 

Arc, I believe it ; 
And to that destiny have patiently 
Laid up my hour to come. 
Pal. Oh, cousin Arcite, 
Where is Thebes now ? where is our noble country ? 
Where are our friends and kindreds ? Never more 
Must we behold those comforts ; never see 
The hardy youths strive for the games of honour. 
Hung with the painted favours of their ladies. 
Like tall ships under sail : then start amongst 'em, 
And, as an east wind, leave 'em all behind us 
Like lazy clouds, whilst Palamon and Arcite, 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 149 

Even in the wagging of a wanton leg, 
Outstript the people's praises, won the garland, 
Ere they have time to wish 'em ours. Oh, never 
Shall we two exercise, like twins of honour, 
Our arras again, and feel our fiery horses, 
Like proud seas, under us ! Our good swords now 
(Better the red-eyed god of war ne'er wore) 
Ravish'd our sides, like age, must run to rust, 
And deck the temples of those gods that hate us : 
These hands shall never draw 'em out like lightning, 
To blast whole armies more. 

Arc. No, Palamon, 
Those hopes are prisoners with us : here we are, 
And here the graces of our youth must wither, 
Like a too timely spring : here age must find us, 
And, which is heaviest, Palamon, unmarried ; 
The sweet embraces of a loving wife, 
Loaden with kisses, arm'd with thousand Cupids, 
Shall never clasp our necks ! No issue know us. 
No figures of ourselves shall we e'er see. 
To glad our age, and like young eaglets teach 'em 
Boldly to gaze against bright arms, and say. 
Remember what your fathers were, and conquer ! 
The fair-eyed maids shall weep our banishments. 
And in their songs curse ever-blinded fortune. 
Till she for shame see what a wrong she has done 
To youth and nature. This is all our world : 
We shall know nothing here, but one another ; 
Hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes ; 
The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it : 
Summer shall come, and with her all delights, 
But dead-cold winter must inhabit here still. 

Pal. *Tis too true, Arcite ! To our Theban hounds. 
That shook the aged forest with their echoes. 
No more now must we hallow ; no more shake 
Our pointed javelins, while the angry swine 
Flies, like a Parthian quiver, from our rages. 



150 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

Struck with our well-steePd darts ! All valiant uses 
(The food and nourishment of noble minds) 
In us two here shall perish ; we shall die 
(Which is the curse of honour) lazily. 
Children of grief and ignorance. 

Arc, Yet, cousin, 
Even from the bottom of these miseries, 
From all that fortune can inflict upon us, 
I see two comforts rising, two mere blessings, 
If the gods please to hold here ; a brave patience. 
And the enjoying of our griefs together. 
Whilst Palamon is with me, let me perish 
If I think this our prison ! 

Pal Certainly, 
'Tis a main goodness, cousin, that our fortunes 
Were twinn'd together ; 'tis most true, two souls 
Put in two noble bodies, let *em suffer 
The gall of hazard, so they grow together, 
Will never sink ; they must not, say they could ; 
A willing man dies sleeping, and all 's done. 

Arc. Shall we make worthy uses of this place. 
That all men hate so much ? 

PaL How, gentle cousin ? 

Arc. Let 's think this prison a holy sanctuary 
To keep us from corruption of worse men ! 
We 're young, and yet desire the ways of honour ; 
That, liberty and common conversation, 
The poison of pure spirits, might, like women, 
Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing 
Can be, but our imaginations 
May make it ours ? And here, being thus together. 
We are an endless mine to one another ; 
We 're father, friends, acquaintance ; 
We are, in one another, families ; 
I am your heir, and you are mine ; this place 
Is our inheritance ; no hard oppressor 
Dare take this from us ; here, with a little patience. 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 151 

We shall live long, and loving ; no surfeits seek us : 
The hand of war hurts none here, nor the seas 
Swallow their youth ; were we at liberty, 
A wife might part us lawfully, or business ; 
Quarrels consume us ; envy of ill men 
Crave our acquaintance ; I might sicken, cousin, 
Where you should never know it, and so perish 
Without your noble hand to close mine eyes. 
Or prayers to the gods : a thousand chances, 
Were we from hence, would sever us. 

Pal. You have made me 
(I thank you, cousin Arcite) almost wanton 
With my captivity ; what a misery 
It is to live abroad, and everywhere ! 
•Tis like a beast, methinks ! I find the court here, 
I 'm sure a more content ; and all those pleasures, 
That woo the wills of men to vanity, 
I see through now ; and am sufficient 
To tell the world 'tis but a gaudy shadow 
That old Time, as he passes by, takes with him. 
What had we been, old in the court of Creon, 
Where sin is justice, lust and ignorance 
The virtues of the great ones ? Cousin Arcite, 
Had not the loving gods found this place for us. 
We had died as they now, ill old men unwept. 
And had their epitaphs, — the people's curses \ 
Shall I say more ? 

Arc. I would hear you still. 

Pal You shall. 
Is there the record of any two that lov'd 
Better than we do, Arcite ? 

Arc. Sure there cannot. 

Pal. I do not think it possible our friendship 
Should ever leave us. 

Arc. Till our deaths it cannot." 

iTius they " sing their bondage freely ;" but 



152 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

just then enters JEmilia, who parts all this 
friendship between them, and turns them to 
deadliest foes. 

The jailor's daughter, who falls in love with 
Palamon, and goes mad, is a wretched inter- 
polation in the story, and a fantastic copy of 
Ophelia. But they readily availed themselves 
of all the dramatic common-places to be found 
in Shakspeare,— love, madness, processions, 
sports, imprisonment, &c., and copied him too 
often in earnest, to have a right to parody him, 
as they sometimes did, in jest. The story of 
^ The Two Noble Kinsmen' is taken from Chau- 
cer's ^ Palamon and Arcite 5' but the latter part, 
which in Chaucer is full of dramatic power 
and interest, degenerates in the play into a 
mere narrative of the principal events, and pos- 
sesses little value or effect. It is not impro- 
bable that Beaumont and Fletcher's having 
dramatised this story, put Dryden upon mo- 
dernising it. 

I cannot go through all Beaumont and 
Fletcher's dramas (52 in number), but I have 
mentioned some of the principal, and the excel- 
lencies and defects of the rest may be judged 
of from these. ^The Bloody Brother,' ^A 
Wife for a Month,' ' Bonduca,' ^ Thierry and 
Theodoret,' are among the best of their trage- 
dies : among the comedies, ' The Night Walker,' 
^The Little French Lawyer/ and * Monsieur 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 153 

Thomas/ come perhaps next to * The Chances,' 
' The Wild Goose Chase,' and ' Rule a Wife 
and Have a Wife.' — ' Philaster, or, Love Lies 
a Bleeding,' is one of the most admirable pro- 
ductions of these authors (the last I shall men- 
tion) ; and the patience of Euphrasia, disguised 
as Bellario, the tenderness of Arethusa, and the 
jealousy of Philaster, are beyond all praise. 
The passages of extreme romantic beauty and 
high-wrought passion that I might quote are 
out of number. One only must suffice, the 
account of the commencement of Euphrasia's 
love to Philaster. 

" Sitting in my window, 

Printing my thought in lawn, I saw a God 
1 thought (but it was you) enter our gates ; 
My blood flew out, and back again as fast 
As I had puffed it forth and suck'd it in 
Like breath ; then was I called away in haste 
To entertain you. Never was a man 
Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd 
So high in thoughts as I : you left a kiss 
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep 
From you for ever. I did hear you talk 
Far above singing ! " 

And so it is our poets themselves write, ^' far 
above singing/'* I am loth to part with them, 
and wander down, as we now must, 

* Euphrasia as the Page, just before speaking of her 
life, which Philaster threatens to take from her, says, 

" Tis not a life ; 

'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." 

What exquisite beauty and delicacy 1 



154 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

** Into a lower world, to theirs obscure 
And wild — to breathe in other air 
Less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits." 

Ben Jonson's serious productions are, in my 
opinion, superior to his comic ones. What he 
does, is the result of strong sense and painful 
industry ; but sense and industry agree better 
with the grave and severe, than with the light 
and gay productions of the muse. " His plays 
were works,^' as some one said of them, '' while 
others' works were plays," The observation 
had less of compliment than of truth in it. He 
may be said to mine his way into a subject, 
like a mole, and throws up a prodigious quan- 
tity of matter on the surface, so that the richer 
the soil in which he labours, the less dross and 
rubbish we have. His fault is, that he sets 
himself too much to his subject, and cannot let 
go his hold of an idea, after the insisting on it 
becomes tiresome or painful to others. But his 
tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is 
more praiseworthy than his delight in what is 
low and disagreeable. His pedantry accords 
better with didactic pomp than with illiterate 
and vulgar gabble ; his learning, engrafted on 
romantic tradition or classical history, looks 
like genius. 

*' Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." 

He was equal, by an effort, to the highest 
things, and took the same, and even more suc- 
cessful pains to grovel to the lowest. He raised 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 155 

himself up or let himself down to the level of 
his subject, by ponderous machinery. By dint 
of application, and a certain strength of nerve, 
he could do justice to Tacitus and Sallust no 
less than to mine host of the New Inn. His 
tragedy of ' The Fall of Sejanus,' in particular, is 
an admirable piece of ancient mosaic. The 
principal character gives one the idea of a lofty 
column of solid granite, nodding to its base 
from its pernicious height, and dashed in pieces 
by a breath of air, a word of its creator — 
feared, not pitied, scorned, unwept, and for- 
gotten. The depth of knowledge and gravity 
of expression sustain one another throughout: 
the poet has worked out the historian's outline, 
so that the vices and passions, the ambition and 
servility of public men, in the heated and poi- 
soned atmosphere of a luxurious and despotic 
court, were never described in fuller or more 
glowing colours. I am half afraid to give any 
extracts, lest they should be tortured into an 
application to other times and characters than 
those referred to by the poet. Some of the 
sounds, indeed, may bear (for what I know) 
an awkward construction : some of the objects 
may look double to squint-eyed suspicion. But 
that is not my fault. It only proves, that 
the characters of prophet and poet are implied 
in each other; that he who describes human 
nature well once, describes it for good and all, 



156 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

as it was, is, and, I begin to fear, will ever be. 
Truth always was, and must always remain, a 
libel to the tyrant and the slave. Thus Satrius 
Secundus and Pinnarius Natta, two public in- 
formers in those days, are described as 

" Two of Sejanus' blood-hounds, whom he breeds 
With human flesh, to bay at citizens." 

But Rufus, another of the same well-bred gang, 
debating the point of his own character with 
two senators whom he has entrapped, boldly 
asserts, in a more courtly strain, 

" To be a spy on traitors 

Is honourable vigilance." 

This sentiment of the respectability of the em- 
ployment of a government spy, which had slept 
in Tacitus for near two thousand years, has not 
been without its modern patrons. The effects 
of such " honourable vigilance" are very finely 
exposed in the following high-spirited dialogue 
between Lepidus and Arruntius, two noble Ro- 
mans, who loved their country, but were not 
fashionable enough to confound their country 
with its oppressors, and the extinguishers of its 
liberty. 

" Arr. What are thy arts (good patriot, teach them me) 
That have preserv'd thy hairs to this white dye, 
And kept so reverend and so dear a head 
Safe on his comely shoulders ? 

Lep, Arts, Arruntius! 
None but the plain and passive fortitude 
To suffer and be silent ; never stretch 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER, 157 

These arms against the torrent ; live at home. 
With my own thoughts and innocence about me, 
Not tempting the wolves' jaws : these are my arts. 

Arr. I would begin to study 'em, if I thought 
They would secure me. May I pray to Jove 
In secret, and be safe ? ay, or aloud ? 
With open wishes ? so I do not mention 
Tiberius or Sejanus ? Yes, I must. 
If I speak out. 'Tis hard, that. May I think, 
And not be rack'd ? What danger is't to dream ? 
Talk in one's sleep, or cough ? Who knows the law ? 
May I shake my head without a comment ? Say 
It rains, or it holds up, and not be throw^n 
Upon the Gemonies ? These now are things 
Whereon men's fortunes, yea, their fate depends ; 
Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the ^dolent ear. 
No place, no day, no hour (we see) is free 
(Not our religious and most sacred times) 
From seme one kind of cruelty ; all matter, 
•Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madman's rage. 
The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing, 
Jesters' simplicity, all, all is good 
That can be catch'd at." 

'Tis a pretty picture ; and the duplicates of 
it, though multiplied without end, are seldom 
out of request. 

The following portrait of a prince besieged by 
flatterers (taken from ' Tiberius') has unrivalled 
force and beauty, with historic truth. 

" If this man 

Had but a mind allied unto his words. 
How blest a fate were it to us, and Rome ? 
Men are deceived, who think there can be thrall 
Under a virtuous prince. Wish'd liberty 
Ne'er lovelier looks than under such a crown. 



158 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHERy 

But when his grace is merely but lip-good, 

And that, no longer than he airs himself 

Abroad in public, there to seem to shun 

The strokes and stripes of flatterers, which within 

Are lechery unto him, and so feed 

His brutish sense with their afflicting sound, 

As (dead to virtue) he permits himself 

Be carried like a pitcher by the ears 

To every act of vice ; this is a case 

Deserves our fear, and doth presage the nigh 

And close approach of bloody tyranny. 

Flattery is midwife unto princes' rage : 

And nothing sooner doth help forth a tyrant 

Than that, and whisperers* grace, that have the time, 

The place, the power, to make all men offenders !" 

The only part of this play in which Ben 
Jonson has completely forgotten himself (or 
rather seems not to have done so) is in the con- 
versations between Livia and Eudemus, about 
a wash for her face, here called ^fucus^ to ap- 
pear before Sej anus. ' Catiline's Conspiracy' does 
not furnish by any means an equal number of 
striking passages, and is spun out to an exces- 
sive length with Cicero's artificial and affected 
orations against Catiline, and in praise of him- 
self. His apologies for his own eloquence, and 
declarations that in all his art he uses no art at 
all, put one in mind of Polonius's circuitous 
way of coming to the point. Both these trage- 
dies, it might be observed, are constructed on the 
exact principles of a French historical picture, 
where every head and figure is borrowed from 
the antique; but somehow, the precious mate- 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 159 

rials of old Roman history and character are 
better preserved in Jonson's page than on David's 
canvas. 

Two of the most poetical passages in Ben 
Jonson are the description of Echo in ' Cyn- 
thia's Revels/ and the fine comparison of the 
mind to a temple, in the ' New Inn / a play 
which, on the whole, however, I can read with 
no patience. 

I must hasten to conclude this Lecture with 
some account of Massinger and Ford, who wrote 
in the time of Charles I. I am sorry I cannot 
do it con amove. The writers of whom I have 
chiefly had to speak were true poets, impas- 
sioned, fanciful, " musical as is Apollo's lute;" 
but Massinger is harsh and crabbed. Ford fini- 
cal and fastidious. I find little in the works 
of these two dramatists, but a display of great 
strength or subtlety of understanding, inveteracy 
of purpose, and perversity of will. This is not 
exactly what we look for in poetry, which, ac- 
cording to the most approved recipes, should 
combine pleasure with profit, and not owe all its 
fascination over the mind to its power of shock- 
ing or perplexing us. The muses should attract 
by grace or dignity of mien. Massinger makes 
an impression by hardness and repulsiveness of 
manner. In the intellectual processes which 
he delights to describe, '' reason panders will :'' 
he fixes arbitrarily on some object which there 
is no motive -to pursue, or every motive com- 



160 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

bined against it, and then, by screwing up his 
heroes or heroines to the deliberate and blind 
accomplishment of this, thinks to arrive at " the 
true pathos and sublime of human life." That 
is not the way. He seldom touches the heart, 
or kindles the fancy. It is in vain to hope to 
excite much sympathy with convulsive efforts of 
the will, or intricate contrivances of the under- 
standing, to obtain that which is better left 
alone, and where the interest arises principally 
from the conflict between the absurdity of the 
passion and the obstinacy with which it is per- 
sisted in. For the most part, his villains are a 
sort of lusus naturce ; his impassioned characters 
are like drunkards or madmen. Their conduct 
is extreme and outrageous, their motives un- 
accountable and weak; their misfortunes are 
without necessity, and their crimes without 
temptation, to ordinary apprehensions. I do 
not say that this is invariably the case in all 
Massinger's scenes, but I think it will be found 
that a principle of playing at cross-purposes is 
the ruling passion throughout most of them. 
This is the case in the tragedy of ' The Unna- 
tural Combat,' in ' The Picture,' ' The Duke of 
Milan,' ' A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' and 
even in ' The Bondman,' and ' The Virgin Mar- 
tyr,' &c. In ' The Picture,' Matthias nearly 
loses his wife's afiections, by resorting to the 
far-fetched and unnecessary device of procuring 
a magical portrait to read the slightest variation 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 161 

in her thoughts. In the same play, Honoria 
risks her reputation and her life to gain a clan- 
destine interview with Matthias, merely to shake 
his fidelity to his wife, and when she has gained 
her object, tells the king her husband in pure 
caprice and fickleness of purpose. ' The Virgin 
Martyr' is nothing but a tissue of instantaneous 
conversions to and from Paganism and Chris- 
tianity. The only scenes of any real beauty 
and tenderness in this play, are those between 
Dorothea and Angelo, her supposed friendless 
beggar-boy, but her guardian angel in disguise, 
which are understood to be by Decker. The 
interest of 'The Bondman' turns upon two dif- 
ferent acts of penance and self-denial, in the 
persons of the hero and heroine, Pisander and 
Cleora. In the Duke of Milan (the most poeti- 
cal of Massinger's productions), Sforza^s reso- 
lution to destroy his wife, rather than bear the 
thought of her surviving him, is as much out of 
the verge of nature and probability, as it is un- 
expected and revolting, from the want of any 
circumstances of palliation leading to it. It 
stands out alone, a pure piece of voluntary atro- 
city, which seems not the dictate of passion, but 
a start of phrensy ; as cold-blooded in the exe- 
cution as it is extravagant in the conception. 

Again, Francesco, in this play, is a person 
whose actions we are at a loss to explain till the 
conclusion of the piece, when the attempt to ac- 
count for them from motives originally amiable 

M 



162 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER^ 

and generous, only produces a double sense of 
incongruity, and instead of satisfying the mind, 
renders it totally incredulous. He endeavours 
to seduce the wife of his benefactor, he then 
(failing) attempts her death, slanders her foully, 
and wantonly causes her to be slain by the hand 
of her husband, and has him poisoned by a 
nefarious stratagem, and all this to appease a 
high sense of injured honour, that ^' felt a stain 
like a wound,'' and from the tender overflowing 
of fraternal affection, his sister having, it ap- 
pears, been formerly betrothed to, and after- 
wards deserted by, the Duke of Milan. Sir 
Giles Overreach is the most successful and 
striking effort of Massinger's pen, and the best 
known to the reader, but it will hardly be 
thought to form an exception to the tenor of 
the above remarks.* The same spirit of caprice 

* The following criticism on this play has appeared in 
another pubUcation, but may be not improperly inserted 
here: 

" * A New Way to Pay Old Debts' is certainly a very 
admirable play, and highly characteristic of the genius of 
its author, which was hard and forcible, and calculated 
rather to produce a strong impression than a pleasing one. 
There is considerable unity of design and a progressive 
interest in the fable, though the artifice by which the 
catastrophe is brought about (the double assumption of 
the character of favoured lovers by Wellborn and Lovell) 
is somewhat improbable, and out of date ; and the moral 
s peculiarly striking, because its whole weight falls upon 
one who all along prides himself in setting every principle 
of justice and all fear of consequences at defiance. 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. l63 

and suUenness survives in Rowers ' Fair Peni- / 
tent/ taken from this author's ' Fatal Dowry/ ( 

" The character of Sir Giles Overreach (the most pro- 
minent feature of the play, whether in the perusal, or as 
it is acted) interests us less by exciting our sympathy 
than our indignation. We hate him very heartily, and yet 
not enough ; for he has strong, robust points about him 
that repel the impertinence of censure, and he sometimes 
succeeds in making us stagger in our opinion of his con- 
duct, by throwing off any idle doubts or scruples that 
might hang upon it in his own mind, ' like dew-drops from 
the lion's mane.' His steadiness of purpose scarcely 
stands in need of support from the common sanctions of 
morality, which he intrepidly breaks through, and he 
almost conquers our prejudices by the consistent and 
determined manner in which he braves them. Self- 
interest is his idol, and he makes no secret of his idolatry : 
he is only a more devoted and unblushing worshipper at 
this shrine than other men. Self-will is the only rule of 
his conduct, to which he makes every other feeling bend : 
or rather, from the nature of his constitution, he has no 
sickly, sentimental obstacles to interrupt him in his head- 
strong career. He is a character of obdurate self-will, 
without fanciful notions or natural affections ; one who 
has no regard to the feelings of others, and who professes 
an equal disregard to their opinions. He minds nothing 
but his own ends, and takes the shortest and surest way 
to them. His understanding is clear-sighted, and his 
passions strong-nerved. Sir Giles is no flincher, and no 
hypocrite ; and he gains almost as much by the hardihood 
with which he avows his impudent and sordid designs as 
others do by their caution in concealing them. He is the 
demon of selfishness personified ; and carves out his way 
to the objects of his unprincipled avarice and ambition 
with an arm of steel, that strikes but does not feel the 
blow it inflicts. The character of calculating, systematic 



164 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

Ford is not so great a favourite with me as 
with some others, from whose judgment I dissent 

self-love, as the master-key to all his actions, is preserved 
with great truth of keeping and in the most trifling cir- 
cumstances. Thus ruminating to himself, he says, * PU 
walk, to get me an appetite : 'tis but a mile ; and exer- 
cise will keep me from being pursy !' — Yet, to show the 
absurdity and impossibility of a man's being governed by 
any such pretended exclusive regard to his own interest, 
this very Sir Giles, who laughs at conscience, and scorns 
opinion, who ridicules every thing as fantastical but wealth, 
solid, substantial wealth, and boasts of himself as having 
been the founder of his own fortune, by his contempt 
for every other consideration, is ready to sacrifice the 
whole of his enormous possessions — to what ? — to a title, 
a bIjHd, to make his daughter * right honourable,' the 
^ife' '^a lord whose name he cannot repeat without 
loathi , and in the end he becomes the dupe of, and falls 
a vict^^ii to, that very opinion of the world which he 
despises ! 

" The character of Sir Giles Overreach has been found 
fault with as unnatural ; and it may, perhaps, in the pre- 
sent refinement of our manners, have become in a great 
measure obsolete. But we doubt whether even still, in 
remote and insulated parts of the country, sufficient traces 
of the same character of wilful selfishness, mistaking the 
inveteracy of its purposes for their rectitude, and boldly 
appealing to power, as justifying the abuses of power, 
may not be found to warrant this an undoubted original— 
probably a fac-simile of some individual of the poet's ac- 
tual acquaintance. In less advanced periods of society 
than that in which we live, if we except rank, which can 
neither be an object of common pursuit nor immediate 
attainment, money is the only acknowledged passport to 
respect. It is not merely valuable as a security from want, 
but it is the only defence against the insolence of power. 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 165 

with diffidence. It has been lamented that the 
play of his which has been most admired (^ 'Tis 

Avarice is sharpened by pride and necessity. There are 
then few of the arts, the amusements, and accomplish- 
ments that soften and sweeten life, that raise or refine it: 
the only way in which any one can be of service to himself 
or another, is by his command over the gross commodities of 
life ; and a man is worth just so much as he has. Where 
he who is not ' lord of acres ' is looked upon as a slave 
and a beggar, the soul becomes wedded to the soil by which 
its worth is measured, and takes root in it in proportion to 
its own strength and stubborness of character. The ex- 
ample of Wellborn may be cited in illustration of these 
remarks. The loss of his land makes all the difference 
between * young master Wellborn' and * rogue Well^^ t^ •* 
and the treatment he meets with in this latter cap / i? 
the best apology for the character of Sir Giles. the 

two, it is better to be the oppressor than the oppre .ed. 

" Massinger, it is true, dealt generally in extreme cha- 
racters, as well as in very repulsive ones. The passion is 
with him wound up to its height at first, and he never lets 
it down afterwards. It does not gradually arise out of 
previous circumstances, nor is it modified by other pas- 
sions. This gives an appearance of abruptness, violence, 
and extravagance to all his plays. Shakspeare's cha- 
racters act from mixed motives, and are made what they 
are by various circumstances. Massinger's characters act 
from single motives, and become what they are, and re- 
main so, by a pure effort of the will, in spite of circum- 
stances. This last author endeavoured to embody an 
abstract principle ; labours hard to bring out the same 
individual trait in its most exaggerated state; and the 
force of his impassioned characters arises for the most part 
from the obstinacy with which they exclude every other 
feeling. Their vices look of a gigantic stature from their 
standing alone. Their actions seem extravagant from 



166 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

Pity She's a Whore') had not a less exceptionable 
subject. I do not know, but I suspect that the 
exceptionableness of the subject is that which con- 
stitutes the chief merit of the play. The repul- 
siveness of the story is what gives it its critical 
interest ; for it is a studiously prosaic statement 
of facts, and naked declaration of passions. 

their having always the same fixed aim — the same incor- 
rigible purpose. The fault of Sir Giles Overreach, in this 
respect, is less in the excess to which he pushes a favourite 
propensity, than in the circumstance of its being unmixed 
with any other virtue or vice. 

" We may find the same simplicity of dramatic con- 
ception in the comic as in the tragic characters of the 
author. Justice Greedy has but one idea or subject in his 
head throughout. He is always eating, or talking of 
eating. His belly is always in his mouth, and we know 
nothing of him but his appetite ; he is as sharpset as 
travellers from off a journey. His land of promise touches 
on the borders of the wilderness : his thoughts are con- 
stantly in apprehension of feasting or famishing. A fat 
turkey floats before his imagination in royal state, and his 
hunger sees visions of chines of beef, venison pasties, and 
Norfolk dumplings, as if it were seized with a calenture. 
He is a very amusing personage ; and in what relates to 
eating and drinking, as peremptory as Sir Giles himself..-^ 
Marrall is another instance of confined comic humour, 
whose ideas never wander beyond the ambition of being 
the implicit drudge of another's knavery or good fortune. 
He sticks to his stewardship, and resists the favour of a 
salute from a fine lady, as not entered in his accounts. 
The humour of this character is less striking in the play 
than in Munden's personification of it. The other cha- 
racters do not require any particular analysis. They are 
very insipid, good sort of people." 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. l67 

It was not the least of Shakspeare's praise, that 
he never tampered with unfair subjects. His 
genius was above it ; his taste kept aloof from it. 
I do not deny the power of simple painting and 
polished style in this tragedy in general, and of a 
great deal more in some few of the scenes, parti- 
cularly in the quarrel between Annabella and her 
husband, which is wrought up to a pitch of de- 
moniac scorn and phrensy with consummate 
art and knowledge ; but I do not find much other 
power in the author (generally speaking) than 
that of playing with edged tools, and knowing 
the use of poisoned weapons. And what confirms 
me in this opinion is the comparative inefBciency 
of his other plays. Except the last scene of ^ The 
Broken Heart' (which I think extravagant-— 
others may think it sublime, and be right), they 
arje merely exercises of style and eff*usions of 
wire-drawn sentiment. Where they have not the 
sting of illicit passion, they are quite pointless, 
and seem painted on gauze, or spun of cobwebs. 
The affected brevity and division of some of the 
lines into hemisticks, &c. so as to make in one 
^case a mathematical stair-case of the words and 
answers given to different speakers*, is an in- 

* " Ithocles, Soft peace enrich this room. 

Orgilus, How fares the lady ? 

Philema, Dead! 

Christalla. Dead ! 

Philema. Starv'd ! 

Christalla, Starv'd ! 

Ithocles, Me miserable !** 



168 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

stance of frigid and ridiculous pedantry. An 
artificial elaborateness is the general characteris- 
tic of Ford^s style. In this respect his plays re- 
semble Miss Baillie's more than any others I am 
acquainted with, and are quite distinct from the 
exuberance and unstudied force which charac- 
terised his immediate predecessors. There is 
too much of scholastic subtlety, an innate perver- 
sity of understanding or predominance of will, 
which either seeks the irritation of inadmissible 
subjects, or to stimulate its own faculties by 
taking the most baj?ren, and making something 
out of nothing, in a spirit of contradiction. He 
does not draw along with the reader : he does 
not work upon our sympathy, but on our anti- 
pathy or our indifference ; and there is as little 
of the social or gregarious principle in his pro- 
ductions as there appears to have been in his 
personal habits, if we are to believe Sir John 
Suckling, who says of him, in the Sessions of the 
Poets — 

" In the dumps John Ford alone by himself sat 
With folded arms and melancholy hat." 

I do not remember without considerable effort 
the plot or persons of most of his plays — ' Per- 
kin Warbeck,' ^ The Lover's Melancholy,' 
' Love's Sacrifice,' and the rest. There is little 
character, except of the most evanescent or ex- 
travagant kind (to which last class we may refer 
that of the sister of Calantha in ' The Broken 
Heart')— -little imagery or fancy, and no action. 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 1G9 

It is but fair, however, to give a scene or two, 
in illustration of these remarks (or in confuta- 
tion pf them, if they are wrong), and I shall 
take the concluding one of ' The Broken Heart,' 
which is held up as the author's master-piece. 

" Scene — A Room in the Palace, 

A Flourish, — Enter Euphranea, led hy Groneas and He- 

mophil: Prophilus, led hy Christalla Gwd Philema: 

Nearchus supporting Calantha ; Crotolon, and 

Amelus. 

Col. We miss our servants, Ithocles and Orgilus. On 

whom attend they ? 
Crot My son, gracious princess, 
Whisper'd some new device, to which these revels 
Should be but usher : wherein I conceive 
Lord Ithocles and he himself are actors. 

Cal. A fair excuse for absence. As for Bassanes, 
Delights to him are troublesome. Armostes 
Is with the king? 

Crot, He is. 

Cal. On to the dance ! 

Cousin, hand you the bride : the bridegroom must be 
Entrusted to my courtship. Be not jealous, 
Euphranea ; 1 shall scarcely prove a temptress. 
Fall to our dance ! 

( They dance the first change^ during which enter 
Armostes. ) 
Arm. (In a whisper to Calantha. ) The king your father's 

dead. 
Cal. To the other change. 
Arm. Is't possible ? 

They dance the second change.^-^Enter Bassanes. 
Bass, ( Whispers Calantha). Oh ! Madam, 
Penthea, poor Penthea's starved. 



170 ON BEAUMONT AND FlETCHER, 

CaL Beshrew thee ! 
Lead to the next ! 
Bass, Amazement dulls my senses. 

They dance the third change. — Enter Orgilus. 

Org. Brave Ithocles is murder'd, murder'd cruelly. 

Col. How dull this music sounds ! Strike up more 
sprightly ; 
Our footings are not active like our heart,* 
Which treads the nimbler measure. 

Org. I am thunderstruck. 

The last Change. 

Cal. So ; let us breathe awhile. {Music ceases. ) Hath 
not this motion 
Rais'd fresher colours on our cheek ? 

Near. Sweet princess, 
A perfect purity of blood enamels 
The beauty of your white. 

Cal. We all look cheerfully : 
And, cousin, 'tis, methinks, a rare presumption 
In any who prefers our lawful pleasures 
Before their own sour censure, to interrupt 
The custom of this ceremony bluntly. 

Near. None dares, lady. 

Cal. Yes, yes ; some hollow voice deliver'd to me 
How that the king was dead. 

Arm. The king is dead," &c. &c. 

This, I confess, appears to me to be tragedy 
in masquerade. Nor is it, I think, accounted 
for, though it may be in part redeemed by her 
solemn address at the altar to the dead body of 
her husband. 

♦ ** High as our heart." — See passage from the 'Mal- 
content,* 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 171 

" Cat, Forgive me. Now I turn to thee, thou shadow 
Of my contracted lord ! Bear witness all, 
I put my mother's wedding-ring upon 
His finger ; 'twas my father's last bequest : 

{Places a ring on the finger of Ithocles.) 
Thus I new marry him, whose wife I am : 
Death shall not separate us. Oh, my lords, 
I but deceiv'd your eyes with antic gesture. 
When one news strait came huddling on another 
Of death, and death, and death : still I danc'd forward ; 
But it struck home and here, and in an instant. 
Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries 
Can vow a present end to all their sorrows. 
Yet live to court new pleasures, and outlive them : 
They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings : 
Let me die smiling. 

Near, 'Tis a truth too ominous. 

Cal. One kiss on these cold lips — my last : crack, crack ; 
Argos, now Sparta's king, command the voices 
Which wait at th' altar, now to sing the song 
I fitted for my end." 

And then, after the song, she dies. 

This is the true false gallop of sentiment: 
anything more artificial and mechanical I can- 
not conceive. The boldness of the attempt, 
however, the very extravagance, might argue 
the reliance of the author on the truth of feeling 
prompting him to hazard it ; but the whole scene 
is a forced transposition of that already alluded 
to in Marston's * Malcontent.' Even the form 
ofthe stage directions is the same. 

" Enter Mendozo supporting the Duchess ; Guerrino ; thu 
Ladies that are on the stage rise, Ferrardo ushers in the 
Duchess ; then takes a Lady to tread a measure. 



172 ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 

Aurelia. We will dance. Music I we will dance. * ♦ 
Enter Prepasso. 
Who saw the Duke ? the Duke ? 

Aurelia. Music ! 

Prepussa. The Duke ? is the Duke returned ? 

Aurelia, Music! 

Enter Celso. 
The Duke is quite invisible, or else is not. 

Aurelia. We are not pleased with your intrusion upon 
our private retirement ; we are not pleased : you have 
forgot yourselves. 

Enter a Page. 

Celso. Boy, thy master ? where's the Duke ? 

Page. Alas, I left him burying the earth with his spread 
joyless limbs ; he told me he was heavy, would sleep : bid 
me walk off, for the strength of fantasy oft made him talk 
in his dreams : I strait obeyed, nor ever saw him since ; 
but wheresoe'er he is, he's sad. 

Aurelia. Music, sound high, as is our heart ; sound 
high. 

Enter Malevole and her Husband, disguised like a Hermit. 
Malevole. The Duke ? Peace, the Duke is dead. 
Aurelia. Music !" Act IV. Scene 3. 

The passage in Ford appears to me an ill- 
judged copy from this. That a woman should 
call for music, and dance on in spite of the death 
of her husband whom she hates, without regard 
to common decency, is but too possible : that 
she should dance on with the same heroic perse- 
verance in spite of the death of her husband, of 
her father, and of every one else whom she loves, 
from regard to common courtesy or appearance, 
is not surely natural. The passions may silence 
the voice of humanity, but it is, I think, equally 



BEN JONSON, FORD, AND MASSINGER. 173 

against probability and decorum to make both 
the passions and the voice of humanity give way 
(as in the example of Calantha) to a mere form 
of outward behaviour. Such a suppression of the 
strongest and most uncontroulable feelings can 
only be justified from necessity, for some great 
purpose, which is not the case in Ford's play ; 
or it must be done for the effect and eclat of the 
thing, which is not fortitude but affectation. Mr 
Lamb, in his impressive eulogy on this passage 
in ^ The Broken Heart/ has failed (as far as I can 
judge) in establishing the parallel between this 
uncalled-for exhibition of stoicism, and the story 
of the Spartan boy. 

It may be proper to remark here, that most of 
the great men of the period I have treated of 
(except the greatest of all, and one other,) were 
men of classical education. They were learned 
men in an unlettered age ; not self-taught men 
in a literary and critical age. This circumstance 
should be taken into the account in a theory of 
the dramatic genius of that age. Except Shak- 
speare, nearly all of them, indeed, came up from 
Oxford or Cambridge, and immediately began 
to write for the stage. No wonder. The first 
coming up to London in those days must have 
had a singular effect upon a young man of ge- 
nius, almost like visiting Babylon or Susa, or a 
journey to the other world. The stage (even as 
it then was), after the recluseness and austerity 
of a college life, must have appeared like Ar- 



174 O^ BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, ETC. 

mida's enchanted palace, and its gay votaries 
like 

" Fairy elves beyond the Indian mount, 
Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side 
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, 
Or dreams he sees ; while overhead the moon 
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth 
Wheels her pale course : they on their mirth and dance 
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear : 
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds." 

So our young novices must have felt when they 
first saw the magic of the scene, and heard its 
syren sounds with rustic wonder and the scho- 
lar's pride : and the joy that streamed from their 
eyes at that fantastic vision, at that gaudy sha- 
dow of life, of all its business and all its plea- 
sures, and kindled their enthusiasm to join the 
mimic throng, still has left a long lingering glory 
behind it; and though now ''deaf the praised 
ear, and mute the tuneful tongue," lives in their 
eloquent page, ''informed with music, senti- 
ment, and thought, never to die !" 



LECTURE V. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. THE FOUR PS, 
THE RETURN FROM PARNASSUS, GAMMER 
GURTOn's NEEDLE, AND OTHER WORKS. 

I SHALL, in this lecture, turn back to give some 
account of single plays, poems, &c. ; the authors 
of which are either not known or not very emi- 
nent, and the productions themselves, in gene- 
ral, more remarkable for their singularity, or 
as specimens of the style and manners of the 
age, than for their intrinsic merit or poetical 
excellence. There are many more works of this 
kind, however, remaining, than I can pretend 
to give an account of; and what I shall chiefly 
aim at, will be to excite the curiosity of the 
reader, rather than to satisfy it. 

* The Four P's'is an interlude, or comic dia- 
logue, in verse, between a Palmer, a Pardoner, 
a Poticary, and a Pedlar, in which each ex- 
poses the tricks of his own and his neighbours' 
profession, with much humour and shrewdness. 
It was written by John Hey wood, the Epigram- 
matist, who flourished chiefly in the reign of 
Henry VIII, was the intimate friend of Sir 



176 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

Thomas More, with whom he seems to have had 
a congenial spirit, and died abroad^ in conse- 
quence of his devotion to the Roman Catholic 
cause, about the year 1565. His zeal, however, 
on this head, does not seem to have blinded his 
judgment, or to have prevented him from using 
the utmost freedom and severity in lashing the 
abuses of Popery, at which he seems to have 
looked '^ with the malice of a friend.^' ' The 
Four P's' bears the date of 1547. It is very 
curious, as an evidence both of the wit, the 
manners, and opinions of the time. Each of the 
parties in the dialogue gives an account of the 
boasted advantages of his own particular call- 
ing, that is, of the frauds which he practises on 
credulity and ignorance, and is laughed at by 
the others in turn. In fact, they all of them 
strive to outbrave each other, till the contest 
becomes a jest, and it ends in a wager who 
shall tell the greatest lie, when the prize is ad- 
judged to him who says that he had found a 
patient woman.* The common superstitions 
(here recorded) in civil and religious matters 
are almost incredible ; and the chopped logic, 
which was the fashion of the time, and which 
comes in aid of the author's shrewd and plea- 
sant sallies to expose them, is highly entertain- 
ing. Thus the Pardoner, scorning the Palmer's 
long pilgrimages and circuitous road to heaven, 

* Or, never known one otherwise than patient. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 177 

flouts him to his face, and vaunts his own supe- 
rior pretensions. 

" Pard. By the first part of this last tale, 
It seemeth you came of late from the ale : 
For reason on your side so far doth fail, 
That you leave reasoning, and begin to rail. 
Wherein you forget your own part clearly, 
For you be as untrue as I : 
But in one part you are beyond me. 
For you may lie by authority. 
And all that have wandered so far, 
That no man can be their controller 
And where you esteem your labour so much 
I say yet again, my pardons are such, 
That if there were a thousand souls on a heap, 
I would bring them all to heaven as good sheep, 
As you have brought yourself on pilgrimage, 
In the last quarter of your voyage. 
Which is far a-this side heaven, by God : 
There your labour and pardon is odd. 
With small cost without any pain. 
These pardons bring them to heaven plain : 
Give me but a penny or two-pence. 
And as soon as the soul departeth hence. 
In half an hour, or three quarters at the most. 
The soul is in heaven with the Holy Giiost." 

The Poticary does not approve of this arro- 
gance of the Friar, and undertakes, in mood and 
figure, to prove them both " false knaves." It 
is he, he says, who sends most souls to heaven, 
and who ought, therefore, to have the credit 
of it. 

" No soul, ye know, entereth heaven-gate. 
Till from the body he be separate : 

N 



178 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

And whom have ye known die honestly, 
Without help of the Poticary ? 
Nay, all that cometh to our handling, 

Except ye hap to come to hanging 

Since of our souls the multitude 
I send to heaven, when all is view'd 
Who should but I then altogether 
Have thank of all their coming thither ? " 

The Pardoner here interrupts him captiously — 

" If ye kill'd a thousand in an hour's space, 
When come they to heaven, dying out of grace?" 

But the Poticary, not so baffled, retorts — 

" If a thousand pardons about your necks were tied ; 
When come they to heaven, if they never died ? 

******* 

But when ye feel your conscience ready, 
I can send you to heaven very quickly." 

The Pedlar finds out the weak side of his 
new companions, and tells them very bluntly 
on their referring their dispute to him, a piece 
of his mind. 

^' Now have I found one mastery, 
That ye can do indifferently ; 
And it is neither selling nor buying. 
But even only very lying." 

At this game of imposture, the cunning dealer 
in pins and laces undertakes to judge their 
merits ; and they accordingly set to work like 
regular graduates. The Pardoner takes the 
lead, with an account of the virtues of his 
relics ; and here we may find a plentiful mix- 
ture of popish superstition and indecency. The 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 179 

bigotry of any age is by no means a test of its 
piety, or even sincerity. Men seemed to make 
themselves amends for the enormity of their 
faith by levity of feeling, as well as by laxity 
of principle ; and in the indifference or ridicule 
with which they treated the wilful absurdities 
and extravagances to which they hood-winked 
their understandings, almost resembled chil- 
dren playing at blindman^s-buff, who grope 
their way in the dark, and make blunders on 
purpose to laugh at their own idleness and folly. 
The sort of mummery at which popish bigotry 
used to play at the time when this old comedy 
was written, was not quite so harmless as blind- 
man's-buff: what was sport to her, was death 
to others. She laughed at her own mockeries 
of common sense and true religion, and mur- 
dered while she laughed. The tragic farce was 
no longer to be borne, and it was partly put an 
end to. At present, though her eyes are blind- 
folded, her hands are tied fast behind her, like 
the false Duessa's. The sturdy genius of mo- 
dern philosophy has got her in much the same 
situation that Count Fathom has the old woman 
that he lashes before him from the robbers' cave 
in the forest. In the following dialogue of this 
lively satire, the most sacred mysteries of the 
Catholic faith are mixed up with its idlest 
legends by old Heywood, who was a martyr to 
his religious zeal, without the slightest sense of 
impropriety. The Pardoner cries out in one 



180 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

place (like a lusty Friar John, or a trusty Friar 
Onion) — 

" Lo, here be pardons, half a dozen. 
For ghostly riches they have no cousin ; 
And, moreover, to me they bring 
Sufficient succour for my living. 
And here be relics of such a kind 
As in this world no man can find. 
Kneel down all three, and when ye leave kissing, 
Who list to offer shall have my blessing. 
Friends, here shall ye see, even anon. 
Of All-Hallov;s the blessed jaw-bone. 
Mark well this, this relic here is a whipper ; 
My friends unfeigned, here's a slipper 
Of one of the seven sleepers, be sure. — 
Here is an eye-tooth of the great Turk : 
Whose eyes be once set on this piece of work, 
May happily lose part of his eye- sight. 
But not all till he be blind outright. 
Kiss it hardly, with good devotion. 

Pot. This kiss shall bring us much promotion : 
Fogh ! by St Saviour, I never kiss'd a worse. 



For, by All- Hallows, yet methinketh 
That All- Hallows* breath stinketh. 

Palm, Ye judge All- Hallows' breath unknown : 
If any breath stink, it is your own. 

Pot. I know mine own breath from All- Hallows, 
Or else it were time to kiss the gallows. 

Pard. Nay, sirs, here may ye see 
The great toe of the Trinity : 
Who to this toe any money voweth, 
And once may roll it in his mouth, 
All his life after I undertake 
He shall never be vex'd with the tooth-ache. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 181 

Pot. I pray you turn that relic about ; 
Either the Trinity had the gout, 
Or else, because it is three toes in one, 
God made it as much as three toes alone. 

Pard. Well, let that pass, and look upon this ; 
Here is a relic that doth not miss 
To help the least as well as the most : 
This is a buttock-bone of Pentecost. 

******* 

Here is a box full of humble-bees, 
That stung Eve as she sat on her knees 
Tasting the fruit to her forbidden : 
Who kisseth the bees within this hidden. 
Shall have as much pardon of right, 

As for any relic he kiss'd this night 

Good friends, I have yet here in this glass. 
Which on the drink at the wedding was 
Of Adam and Eve undoubtedly : 
If ye honour this relic devoutly. 
Although ye thirst no whit the less. 
Yet shall ye drink the more, doubtless. 
After which drinking, ye shall be as meet 
To stand on your head as on your feet." 

The same sort of significant irony runs 
through the Apothecary's knavish enumeration 
of miraculous cures in his possession. 

** For this medicine helpeth one and other. 
And bringeth them in case that they need no other. 
Here is a syrapus de Byzansis, — 
A little thing is enough of this ; 
For even the weight of one scrippal 

Shall make you as strong as a cripple 

These be the things that break all strife 
Between man's sickness and his life. 
From all pain these shall you deliver, 
And set you even at rest for ever. 



182 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

Here is a medicine no more like the same, 

"Which commonly is called thus by name 

Not one thing here particularly, 

But worketh universally ; 

For it doth me as much good when I sell it, 

As all the buyers that take it or smell it. 

If any reward may entreat ye, 

I beseech your mastership be good to me. 

And ye shall have a box of marmalade, 

So fine that you may dig it with a spade." 

After these quaint but pointed examples of it. 
Swift's boast with respect to the invention of 
irony, 

" Which I was born to introduce, 
Refin'd it first, and shew'd its use," 

can be allowed to be true only in part. 

The controversy between them being unde- 
cided, the Apothecary, to clench his preten- 
sions ^' as a liar of the first magnitude," by a 
coup'de-grace^ says to the Pedlar, " You are an 
honest man ;" but this home-thrust is somehow 
ingeniously parried. The Apothecary and Par- 
doner fall to their narrative vein again; and 
the latter tells a story of fetching a young wo- 
man from the lower world, from which I shall 
only give one specimen more as an instance of 
ludicrous and fantastic exaggeration. By the 
help of a passport from Lucifer, " given in the 
furnace of our palace,'' he obtains a safe conduct 
from one of the subordinate imps to his master's 
presence. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 183 

" This devil and I walked arm in arm 
So far, till he had brought me thither, 
Where all the devils of hell together 
Stood in array in such apparel. 
As for that day there meetly fell. 
Their horns well gilt, their claws full clean. 
Their tails well kempt, and, as I ween, 
With sothery butter their bodies anointed ; 
I never saw devils so well appointed. 
The master-devil sat in his jacket. 
And all the souls were playing at racket. 
None other rackets they had in hand. 
Save every soul a good fire-brand ; 
Wherewith they play'd so prettily. 
That Lucifer laughed merrily. 
And all the residue of the fiends 
Did laugh thereat full well, like friends. 
But of my friend I saw no whit, 
Nor durst not ask for her as yet. 
Anon all this rout was brought in silence, 
And I by an usher brought to presence 
Of Lucifer ; then low, as well I could,. 
I kneeled, which he so well allow'd 
That thus he beck'd, and by St Antony 
He smiled on me well-favour'dly. 
Bending his brows as broad as barn-doors ; 
Shaking his ears as rugged as burrs ; 
Rolling his eyes as round as two bushels ; 
Flashing the fire out of his nostrils ; 
Gnashing his teeth so vain-gloriously. 
That methought time to fall to flattery. 
Wherewith I told, as I shall tell ; 
Oh pleasant picture ! O prince of hell ! " &c. 

The piece concludes with some good whole- 
some advice from the Pedlar, who here, as well 
as in the poem of the ' Excursion,' performs 



184 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

the part of Old Morality; but he does not 
seem, as in the latter case, to be acquainted 
with the " mighty stream of Tendency/^ He 
is more full of ^^wise saws'^ than "modern 
instances ;'' as prosing, but less paradoxical ! 

*' But where ye doubt, the truth not knowing. 
Believing the best, good may be growing. 
In judging the best, no harm at the least ; 
In judging the worst, no good at the best. 
But best in these things, it seemeth to me. 
To make no judgment upon ye ; 
But as the church does judge or take them. 
So do ye receive or forsake them. 
And so be you sure you cannot err, 
But maybe a fruitful follower." 

Nothing can be clearer than this. 

The * Return from Parnassus' was *^ first 
publicly acted," as the title-page imports, '^ by 
the students in St John's College, Cambridge." 
It is a very singular, a very ingenious, and, as 
I think, a very interesting performance. It 
contains criticisms on contemporary authors, 
strictures on living manners, and the earliest 
denunciation (I know of) of the miseries and 
unprofitableness of a scholar's life. The only 
part I object to in our author's criticism is his 
abuse of Marston ; and that, not because he 
says what is severe, but because he says what 
is not true of him. Anger may sharpen our 
insight into men's defects ; but nothing should 
make us blind to their excellences. The whole 
passage is, however, so curious in itself (like 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 185 

the ^Edinburgh Review' lately published for 
the year 1755) that I cannot forbear quoting a 
great part of it. We find in the list of candi- 
dates for praise many a name — 

" That like a trumpet makes the spirits dance ;" 

there are others that have long since sunk to the 
bottom of the stream of time, and no Humane 
Society of Antiquarians and Critics is ever 
likely to fish them up again. 

" Judicio, Read the names. 

Ingenioso, So I will, if thou wilt help me to censure 
them. 



John Marston, 
Kit Marlowe, 
William Shakspeare; 
and one Churchyard 
[who is consigned to an 
untimely grave.] 



Edmund Spenser 

Henry Constable, 

Thomas Lodge, 

Samuel Daniel, 

Thomas Watson, 

Michael Drayton, 

John Davis, 

Good men and true, stand together, hear your cen- 
sure: what's thy judgment of Spenser? 

Jud, A sweeter swan than ever sung in Po ; 
A shriller nightingale than ever blest 
The prouder groves of self-admiring Rome, 
Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud, 
While he did chaunt his rural minstrelsy. 
Attentive was full many a dainty ear : 
Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue, 
While sweetly of his Faery Queen he sung ; 
While to the water's fall he tun'd her fame, 
And in each bark engrav'd Eliza's name. 
And yet for all, this unregarding soil 
Unlaced the line of his desired life. 
Denying maintenance for his dear relief; 



186 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

Careless even to prevent his exequy, 
Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye. 

Ing. Pity it is that gentler wits should breed, 
Where thick-skinned chuffs laugh at a scholar's need. 
But softly may our honour'd ashes rest, 
That lie by merry Chaucer's noble chest. 

But I pray thee proceed briefly in thy censure, that I 
may be proud of myself, as in the first, so in the last, my 
censure may jump with thine. Henry Constable, Samuel 
Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Thomas \yatson. 

Jud. Sweet Constable doth take the wondering ear, 
And lays it up in willing prisonment : 
Sweet honey- dropping Daniel doth wage 
War with the proudest big Italian, 
That melts his heart in sugar'd sonnetting. 
Only let him more sparingly make use 
Of others' wit, and use his own the more, 
That well may scorn base imitation. 
For Lodge and Watson, men of some desert, 
Yet subject to a critic's marginal : 
Lodge for his oar in every paper boat, 
He that turns over Galen every day, 
To sit and simper Euphues' legacy. 

Ing. Michael Drayton. 

Jud. Drayton's sweet Muse is like a sanguine dye, 
Able to ravish the rash gazer's eye. 

Ing. However, he w^ants one true note of a poet of our 
times ; and that is this, he cannot swagger in a tavern, 
nor domineer in a pot-house. John Davis — 

Jud. Acute John Davis, I affect thy rhymes, 
That jerk in hidden charms these looser times : 
Thy plainer verse, thy unaffected vein. 
Is graced with a fair and sweeping train. 
John Marston — 

Jud. What, Monsieur Kinsayder, put up, man, put up 
for shame. 
Methinks he is a ruffian in his style, 
Withouten bands or garters' ornament. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 187 

He quaffs a cup of Frenchman's helicon, 

Then royster doyster in his oily terms 

Cuts, thrusts, and foins at vvhomsoe'er he meets, 

And strews about Ram-alley meditations. 

Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch'd terms, 

Cleanly to ^ird our looser libertines ? 

Give him plain naked words stript from their shirts, 

That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine. 

Ing. Christopher IMarlowe — 

Jud, Marlow^e was happy in his buskin'd Muse : 
Alas ! unhappy in his life and end. 
Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, 
Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell. 

Ing. Our theatre hath lost, Pluto hath got 
A tragic penman for a dreary plot. 
Benjamin Jonson. 

Jud. The wittiest fellow^ of a bricklayer in England. 

Ing. A mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by 
observation^ and makes only nature privy to what he en- 
dites : so slow an inventor, that he were better betake 
himself to his old trade of bricklaying ; a blood whoreson, 
as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times 
past in laying of a brick. 
Wniiam Shakspeare. 

Jud. Who loves Adonis' love, or Lucrece' rape, 
His sweeter verse contains heart-robbing life. 
Could but a graver subject him content, 
Without love's lazy foolish languishment." 

This passage might seem to ascertain the date 
of the piece, as it must be supposed to have been 
written before Shakspeare had become known as 
a dranlatic poet. Yet he afterwards introduces 
Kempe the actor talking with Burbage, and 
saying, *^ Few (of the University) pens play 
well : they smell too much of that writer Ovid, 



188 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

and of that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too 
much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's 
our fellow Shakspeare puts them all down ; ay, 
and Ben Jonson too." — There is a good deal of 
discontent in all this ; but the author complains 
of want of success in a former attempt, and 
appears not to have been on good terms with 
fortune. The miseries of a poet's life forms one 
of the favourite topics of * The Return from Par- 
nassus/ and are treated as if by some one who 
had *^felt them knowingly. '^ Thus Philomusus 
and Studioso chaunt their griefs in concert. 

" Phil. Bann'd be those hours, when 'mongst the learned 
throng. 
By Granta's muddy bank we whilom sung. 

Stud, Bann*d be that hill which learned wits adore, 
Where erst we spent our stock and little store. 

Phil, Bann'd be those musty mews, where we have 
spent 
Our youthful days in paled languishment. 

Stud. Bann'd be those cozening arts that wrought our 
woe. 
Making us wandering pilgrims to and fro. . . . 

Phil. Curst be our thoughts whene'er they dream of 
hope; 
Bann'd be those haps that henceforth flatter us, 
When mischief dogs us still, and still for aye. 
From our first birth until our burying day. 
In our first gamesome age, our doting sires 
Carked and car'd to have us lettered : 
Sent us to Cambridge where our oil is spent : 
Us our kind college from the teat did tent. 
And forced us walk before we weaned were. 
From that time since wandered have we still 



ON Single plays, poems, etc. 189 

In the wide world, urg'd by our forced will ; 

Nor ever have we happy fortune tried ; 

Then why should hope with our rent state abide ?'* 

" Out of our proof we speak. '^ — This sorry 
matter-of-fact retrospect of the evils of a college 
life is very different from the hypothetical aspi- 
rations after its incommunicable blessings ex- 
pressed by a living writer of true genius and a 
lover of true learning, who does not seem to 
have been cured of the old-fashioned prejudice 
in favour of classic lore, two hundred years after 
its vanity and vexation of spirit had been de- 
nounced in ' The Return from Parnassus :' — 
" I was not trained in academic bowers ; 
And to those learned streams I nothing owe, 
Which copious from those fair twin founts do flow : 
Mine have been anything but studious hours. 
Yet can I fancy wandering 'mid thy towers. 
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap. 
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap ; 
And I walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. 
Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech ; 
Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain, 
And my skull teems with notions infinite : 
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 
Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen's 

vein ; 
And half had stagger'd that stout Stagyrite."* 

Thus it is that our treasure always lies where 
our knowledge does not, and fortunately enough 
perhaps; for the empire of imagination is wider 
and more prolific than that of experience. 

* ' Sonnet to Cambridge,' by Charles Lamb. 



190 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

The author of the old play, whoever he was, 
appears to have belonged to that class of mortals, 
who, as Fielding has it, feed upon their own 
hearts ; who are egotists the wrong way, made 
desperate by too quick a sense of constant infe- 
licity ; and have the same intense uneasy con- 
sciousness of their own defects that most men 
have self-complacency in their supposed advan- 
tages. Thus venting the driblets of his spleen 
still upon himself, he prompts the Page to say, 
^' A mere scholar is a creature that can strike 
fire in the morning at his tinder-box, put on a 
pair of lined slippers, sit rheuming till dinner, 
and then go to his meat when the bell rings ; 
one that hath a peculiar gift in a cough, and a 
license to spit : or if you will have him defined 
by negatives, he is one that cannot make a good 
leg, one that cannot eat a mess of broth cleanly, 
one that cannot ride a horse without spur-galling, 
one that cannot salute a woman and look on her 
directly, one that cannot '* 

If I was not afraid of being tedious, I might 
here give the examination of Signer Immerito, 
a raw ignorant clown (whose father has pur- 
chased him a living), by Sir Roderick and the 
Recorder, which throws a considerable light on 
the state of wit and humour, as well as of eccle- 
siastical patronage in the reign of Elizabeth. 
It is to be recollected that one of the titles of 
this play is * A Scourge for Simony.* 

* Rec, For as much as nature has done her part in 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 191 

makinf^ you a handsome likely man — in the next place 
some art is requisite for the perfection of nature : for the 
trial whereof, at the request of my worshipful friend, I 
will in some sort propound questions fit to be resolved by 
one of your profession. Say what is a person, that was 
never at the university ? 

Im. A person that was never in the university, is a 
living creature that can eat a tythe pig. 

Rec. Very well answered : but you should have added — 
and must be officious to his patron. Write down that 
answer, to shew his learning in logic. 

Sir Rod, Yea, boy, write that down : very learnedly, 
in g^ood faith, I pray now let me ask you one question 
that I remember, whether is the masculine gender or the 
feminine more worthy ? 

Im. The feminine, sir. 

Sir Rod, The right answer, the right answer. In 
good faith, I have been of that mind always : write, boy, 
that, to shew he is a grammarian. 

Rec* What university are you of? 

Im. Of none. 
. ,, Sir Rod. He tells truth : to tell truth is an excellent 
virtue : boy, make two heads, one for his learning, another 
for his virtues, and refer this to the head of his virtues, 
not of his learning, Now, Master Recorder, if it please 
you, I will examine him in an author, that will sound him 
to the depth ; a book of astronomy, otherwise called an 
almanack. 

Rec. Very good, Sir Roderick ; it were to be wished 
there were no other book of humanity ; then there would 
not be such busy state- prying fellows as are now a-days. 
Proceed, good sir. 

Sir Rod. What is the dominical letter ? 

Im. C, sir, and please your worship. 

Sir Rod. A very good answer, a very good answer, the 
very answer of the book. Write down that, and refer it 



192 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

to his skai in philosophy. How many days hath Sep- 
tember ? 

Im. Thirty days hath September, April, June, and No- 
vember, February hath twenty-eight alone, and all the 
rest hath thirty and one. 

Sir Rod, Very learnedly, in good faith : he hath also 
a smack in poetry. Write down that boy, to show his 
learning in poetry. How many miles from Waltham to 
London ? 

Im. Twelve, sir. 

Sir Rod. How many from Newmarket to Grantham? 

Im. Ten, sir. 

Sir Rod. Write down that answer of his, to show his 
learning in arithmetic. 

Page. He must needs be a good arithmetician that 
counted [out] money so lately. 

Sir Rod. When is the new moon ? 

Im. The last quarter, the fifth day, at two of the clock, 
and thirty-eight minutes, in the morning. 

Sir Rod. How call you him that is weather-wise ? 

Rec. A good astronomer. 

Sir Rod. Sirrah, boy, write him down for a good as- 
tronomer. What day of the month lights the queen's 
day on ? 

Im. The 17th of November. 

Sir Rod. Boy, refer this to his virtues, and write him 
down a good subject. 

Page. Faith, he were an excellent subject for two or 
three good wits ; he would make a fine ass for an ape to 
ride upon. 

Sir Rod. And these shall suffice for the parts of his 
learning. Now it remains to try, whether you be a man 
of a good utterance, that is, whether you can ask for the 
strayed heifer with the white face, as also chide the boys 
in the belfry, and bid the sexton whip out the dogs : let 
me hear your voice. 

Im, If any man or woman— 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 193 

Sir Bod. That's too high. 

Im. If any man or woman. 

Sir Bod. That's too low. 

Im. If any man or woman can tell any tidings of a 
horse with four feet, two ears, that did stray about the 
seventh hour, three minutes in the forenoon, the fifth day — 

Sir Bod. Boy, write him down for a good utterance. 
Master Recorder, I think he hath been examined suffi- 
ciently. 

Bee. Ay, Sir Roderick, 'tis so : we have tried him very 
thoroughly. 

Page. Ay, we have taken an inventory of his good 
parts, and prized them accordingly. 

Sir Bod. Signior Immerito, forasmuch as we have 
made a double trial of thee, the one of your learning, the 
other of your erudition ; it is expedient, also, in the next 
place, to give you a few exhortations, considering the 
greatest clerks are not the wisest men : this is therefore 
first to exhort you to abstain from controversies ; secondly, 
not to gird at men of worship, such as myself, but to use 
yourself discreetly ; thirdly, not to speak when any man 
or woman coughs : do so, and in so doing, I will persevere 
to be your worshipful friend and loving patron. Lead 
Immerito in to my son, and let him despatch him, and 
remember my tythes to be reserved, paying twelve-pence 
a-year. 

' Gammer Gurton's Needle'* is a still older 
and more curious relic ; and is a regular comedy 
in five acts, built on the circumstance of an old 
woman having lost her needle, which throws 
the whole village into confusion, till it is at last 
providentially found sticking in an unlucky part 

r • The name of Still has been assigned as the author of 
this singular production, with the date of 1566. 

o 



194 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

of Hodge's dress. This must evidently have 
happened at a time when the manafacturers of 
Sheffield and Birmingham had not reached the 
height of perfection which they have at present 
done. Suppose that there is only one sewing- 
needle in a parish, that the owner, a diligent, 
notable old dame, loses it, that a mischief- 
making wag sets it about that another old 
woman has stolen this valuable instrument of 
household industry, that strict search is made 
everywhere in-doors for it in vain, and that then 
the incensed parties sally forth to scold it out 
in the open air, till words end in blows, and the 
affair is referred over to the higher authorities, 
and we shall have an exact idea (though perhaps 
not so lively a one) of what passes in this au- 
thentic document between Gammer Gurton and 
her Gossip Dame Chat, Diccon the Bedlam 
(the causer of these harms), Hodge, Gammer 
Gurton's servant, Tyb, her maid, Cocke, her 
^prentice boy, Doll, Scapethrift, Master Baillie, 
his master, Doctor Rat, the curate, and Gib 
the Cat, who may be fairly reckoned one of the 
dramatis personce^ and performs no mean part. 

" Gog's crosse, Gammer" (says Cocke, the boy), "if ye 

will laugh, look in but at the door, 
And see how Hodge lieth tumbling and tossing amidst the 

floor. 
Raking there some fire to find among the ashes dead"* 
Where there is not a spark so big as a pin's head : 

* That is, to light a candle to look for the lost needle. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 195 

At last in a dark corner two sparks he thought he sees, 
Which were indeed nought else but Gib our cat's two eyes. 
Puff, quoth Hodge ; thinking thereby to have fire without 

doubt ; 
With that Gib shut her two eyes, and so the fire was out ; 
And by and by them opened, even as they were before, 
With that the sparks appeared, even as they had done of 

yore ; 
And even as Hodge blew the fire, as he did think, 
Gib, as he felt the blast, straightway began to wink ; 
Till Hodge fell of swearing, as came best to his turn ; 
The fire was sure bewitch'd, and therefore would not burn. 
At last Gib up the stairs, among old posts and pins, 
And Hodge he hied him after, till broke were both his 

shins ; 
Cursing and swearing oaths, were never of his making, 
That Gib would fire the house, if that she were not taken." 
Diccon, the strolling beggar (or Bedlam, as 
he is called) steals a piece of bacon from behind 
Gammer Gurton's door, and in answer to 
Hodge's complaint of being dreadfully pinched 
for hunger, asks — 

** Why, Hodge, was there none at home thy dinner for to 
set? 
Hodge. Gog's bread, Diccon, I came too late, was no- 
thing there to get: 
Gib (a foul fiend might on her light) lick'd the milk-pan 

so clean : 
See, Diccon, 'twas not so well wash'd this seven year I 

ween. 
A pestilence light on all ill luck, I had thought yet for all 

this. 
Of a morsel of bacon behind the door, at worst I should 

not miss : 
But when 1 sought a slip to cut, as I was wont to do, 
Gog's souls, Diccon, Gib our cat had eat the bacon too." 



196 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

Hodge's difficulty in making Diccon under- 
stand what the needle is which his dame has 
lost, shows his superior acquaintance with the 
conveniences and modes of abridging labour in 
more civilised life, of which the other had no 
idea. 

" Hodge. Has she not gone, trowest now thou, and lost 

her neele ?'* [So it is called here.] 
*' Dk. (says staring). Her eel, Hodge ? "Who fished 

of late ? That was a dainty dish. 
Hodge. Tush, tush, her neele, her neele, her neele, man, 
* [tis neither flesh nor fish : 
A little thing with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller 

[silver], 
Small, long, sharp at the point, and strait as any pillar. 
Die. I know not what a devil thou mean'st, thou 

bring'st me more in doubt. 
Hodge, {answers with disdain J. Know'st not with what 
Tom tailor's man sits broching through a clout? 
A neele, a neele, my Gammer's neele is gone." 

The rogue Diccon threatens to show Hodge a 
spirit; but though Hodge runs away through 
pure fear before it has time to appear, he does 
not fail, in the true spirit of credulity, to give a 
faithful and alarming account of what he did not 
see to his mistress, concluding with a hit at the 
Popish clergy. 

" By the mass, I saw him of late call up a great black 

devil. 
Oh, the knave cried, ho, ho, he roared and thunder'd ; 
And ye had been there, I am sure you'd murrainly ha' 

wonder'd. 
Gam. Wast not thou afraid, Hodge, to see him in his 

place ? 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 197 

Hodge, flies and says). No, and he had come to me, 
should have laid him on his face, 
Should have promised him. 

Gam. But, Hodge, had he no horns to push ? 
Hodge. As long as your two arms. Saw ye never Friar 
Rush, 
Painted on a cloth, with a fine long cow's tail, 
And crooked cloven feet, and many a hooked nail ? 
For all the world (if I should judge) should reckon him 

his brother : 
Look even what face Friar Rush had, the devil had such 
another. " 

He then adds (quite apocryplially) while he 
is in for it, that '^the devil said plainly that 
Dame Chat had got the needle,'' which makes 
all the disturbance. The same play contains 
the well-known good old song, beginning and 
ending — 

" Back and side go bare, go bare. 
Both foot and hand go cold : 
But belly, God send thee good ale enough, 
Whether it be new or old. 
I cannot eat but little meat, 
My stomach is not good ; 
But sure I think, that I can drink 
With him that wears a hood ; 
Though I go bare, take ye no care ; 
I nothing am a- cold: 
I stuff my skin so full within 
Of jolly good ale and old. 
Back and side go bare, &;c. 
I love no roast, but a nut-brown toast, 
Andra. crab laid in the fire : 
A little bread, shall do me stead, 
Much bread I not desire. 



198 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC, 

No frost or snow, no wind I trow, 

Can hurt me if I wolde, 

I am so wrapt and thoroughly lapt 

In jolly good ale and old. 

Back and side go bare, &c. 

And Tib, my wife, that as her life 

Loveth well good ale to seek ; 

Full oft drinks she, till ye may see 

The tears run down her cheek : 

Then doth she troll to me the bowl, 

Even as a malt-worm sholde : 

And saith, sweetheart, I took my part 

Of this jolly good ale and old. 

Back and side go bare, go bare, 

Both foot and hand go cold : 

But belly, God send thee good ale enough. 

Whether it be new or old. 

Such was the wit, such was the mirth of our 
ancestors : — homely, but hearty ; coarse perhaps, 
but kindly. Let no man despise it, for '' Evil 
to him that evil thinks/' To think it poor and 
beneath notice because it is not just like ours, 
is the same sort of hypercriticism that was ex- 
ercised by the person who refused to read some 
old books, because they were '' such very poor 
spelling. '* The meagreness of their literary or 
their bodily fare was at least relished by them- 
selves ; and this is better than a surfeit or an 
indigestion. It is refreshing to look out of our- 
selves sometimes, not to be always holding the 
glass to our own peerless perfections; and as 
there is a dead wall which always intercepts the 
prospect of the future from our view, (all that 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 199 

we can see beyond it is the heavens,) it is as well 
to direct our eyes now and then without scorn 
to the page of history, and repulsed in our at- 
tempts to penetrate the secrets of the next six 
thousand years^ not to turn our backs on auld 
lang sync ! 

The other detached plays of nearly the same 
period of which I proposed to give a cursory 
account, are ^Green's Tu Quoque,' ^Microcos- 
mus,' ' Lingua/ ^ The Merry Devil of Edmonton,' 
^The Pinner of Wakefield,' and ^ The Spanish 
Tragedy/ Of the spurious plays attributed to 
Shakspeare, and to be found in some of the edi- 
tions of his works, such as ' The Yorkshire Tra- 
gedy,' ' Sir John Oldcastle,' ' The Widow of 
Watling Street,' &c., I shall say nothing here, 
because 1 suppose the reader to be already ac- 
quainted with them, and because I have given a 
general account of them in another work. 

' Green's Tu Quoque,' by George Cook, a 
contemporary of Shakspeare's, is so called from 
Green the actor, who played the part of Bubble 
in this very lively and elegant comedy, with the 
cant phrase of Tu quoque perpetually in his 
mouth. The double change of situation be- 
tween this fellow and his master, Staines, each 
passing from poverty to wealth, and from wealth 
to poverty again, is equally well imagined and 
executed. A gay and gallant spirit pervades the 
whole of it ; wit, poetry, and morality, each 
take their turn in it. The characters of the two 



200 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

sisters, Joyce and Gertrude, are very skilfully 
contrasted, and the manner in which they mu- 
tually betray one another into the hands of their 
lovers, first in the spirit of mischief, and after- 
wards of retaliation, is quite dramatic. " If 
you cannot find in your heart to tell him you 
love him, I'll sigh it out for you. Come, we 
little creatures must help one another,^' says the 
Madcap to the Madonna. As to style and 
matter, this play has a number of pigeon-holes 
full of wit and epigrams which are flying out 
in almost every sentence. I could give twenty 
pointed conceits, wrapped up in good set terms. 
Let one or two at the utmost suffice. A bad 
hand at cards is thus described. Will Rash 
says to Scattergood, '' Thou hast a wild hand 
indeed ; thy small cards show like a troop of 
rebels, and the knave of clubs is their chief 
leader.'' Bubble expresses a truism very gaily 
on finding himself equipped like a gallant- — 
^' How apparel makes a man respected ! The 
very children in the street do adore me.'' We find 
here the first mention of Sir John Suckling's 
^^ melancholy hat," as a common article of wear 
— the same which he chose to clap on Ford's 
head, and the first instance of the theatrical 
double entendre which has been repeated ever 
since of an actor's ironically abusing himself in 
his feigned character. 

" Gervase. They say Green 's a good clown. 
I Bubble, (Played by Green, says) Green I Greenes an as& 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 201 

Scattergood, Wherefore do you say so ? 
J^ub, Indeed, I ha* no reason ; for they say he's as like 
me as ever he can look." 

The following description of the dissipation 
of a fortune in the hands of a spendthrift is in-^ 
genious and beautiful. 

" Know that which made him gracious in your eyes, 
And gilded o'er his imperfections, 
Is wasted and consumed even like ice, 
Which by the vehemence of heat dissolves, 
And glides to many rivers : so his wealth, 
That felt a prodigal hand, hot in expense. 
Melted within his gripe, and from his coffers 
Ran like a violent stream to other men's." 

' Microcosmus,' by Thomas Nabbes, is a dra- 
matic mask or allegory, in which the Senses, 
the Soul, a Good and a Bad Genius, Consci- 
ence, &c., contend for the dominion of a man; 
and notwithstanding the awkwardness of the 
machinery, is not without poetry, elegance, 
and originality. Take the description of morn- 
ing as a proof. 

" What do I see ? Blush, grey-eyed morn, and spread 
Thy purple shame upon the mountain tops ; 
Or pale thyself with envy, since here comes 
A brighter Venus than the dull-eyed star 
That lights thee up." 

But what are we to think of a play, of which 
the following is a literal list of the dramatis 
personce ? 

" Nature, a fair woman, in a white robe, wrought with 
birds, beasts, fruits, flowers, clouds, stars, &c. ; on her 
head a wreath of flowers interwoven with stars. 



202 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

Janus, a man with two faceSj signifying Providence, in a 
yellow robe, wrought with snakes, as he is deus anni : 
on his head a crown. He is Nature's husband. 

Fire, a fierce-countenanced young man, in a flame-coloured 
robe, wrought with gleams of fire ; his hair red, and on 
his head a crown of flames. His creature a Vulcan. 

Air, a young man of a variable countenance, in a blue 
robe, wrought with divers coloured clouds; his hair 
blue ; and on his head a wreath of clouds. His crea- 
ture a giant or silvan. 

Water, a young woman in a sea-green robe, wrought with 
waves ; her hair a sea-green, and on her head a wreath 
of sedge bound about with waves. Her creature a syren. 

Earth, a young woman of a sad countenance, in a grass- 
green robe, wrought with sundry fruits and flowers ; 
her hair black, and on her head a chaplet of flowers. 
Her creature a pigmy. 

Love, a Cupid in a flame-coloured habit ; bow and quiver, 
a crown of flaming hearts, &c. 

Physander, a perfect grown man, in a long white robe, 
and on his head a garland of white lilies and roses mixed. 
His name ^tto tyis ^vasos koci rS ay^^o^, 

Choler, a fencer ; his clothes red. 

Blood, a dancer, in a watchet-coloured suit. 

Phlegm, a physician, an old man; his doublet white and 
black ; trunk hose. 

Melancholy, a musician ; his complexion, hair, and clothes 
black ; a lute in his hand. He is likewise an amorist. 

Bellanima, a lovely woman, in a long white robe ; on her 
head a wreath of white flowers. She signifies the soul. 

Bonus Genius, an angel, in a like white robe ; wings and 
wreath white. 

Malus Genius, a devil, in a black robe ; hair, wreath and 
wings black. 

The Five Senses— Seeing, a chambermaid ; Hearing, the 
usher of the hall ; Smelling, a huntsman or gardener ; 
Tasting, a cook ; Touching, a gentleman usher. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POELS, ETC. 203 

Sensuality, a wanton woman, richly habited, but lasci- 
viously dressed, &c. 

Temperance, a lovely woman, of a modest countenance ; 
her garments plain, but decent, &c. 

A Philosopher, -n 

An Eremite, I „ , , 

A Ploughman, S ah properly habited. 

A Shepherd, J 

Three Furies as they are commonly fancied. 

Fear, the crier of the court, with a tipstaff. 

Conscience, the Judge of the court. 

Hope and Despair, an advocate and a lawyer. 

The other three Virtues, as they are frequently expressed 
by painters. 

The Heroes, in bright antique habits, &c. 

The front of a workmanship proper to the fancy of the 
rest, adorned with brass figures of angels and devils, 
with several inscriptions; the title is an escutcheon, 
supported by an angel and a devil. Within the arch a 
continuing perspective of ruins, which is drawn still be- 
fore the other scenes, whilst they are varied. 

THE INSCRIPTIONS. 

Hinc gloria* Hinc poena. 

Appetitus boni. Appetitus mali." 

Antony Brewer's 'Lingua^ (1607) is of the 
same cast. It is much longer as well as older 
than ' Microcosmus.^ It is also an allegory 
celebrating the contention of the Five Senses 
for the crown of superiority, and the preten- 
sions of Lingua, or the Tongue, to be admitted 
as a sixth sense. It is full of child's play, and 
old wives' tales; but is not unadorned with 
passages displaying strong good sense, and 
powers of fantastic description. 

Mr Lamb has quoted two passages from it — 



204 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

the admirable enumeration of the characteristics 
of different languages, ' The Chaldee wise, the 
Arabian physical,' &c. ; and the striking de- 
scription of the ornaments and uses of tragedy 
and comedy. The dialogue between Memory, 
Common Sense, and Phantastes, is curious and 
worth considering. 

" Common Sense, Why, good father, why are you so 
late now-a-days ? 

Memory. Thus 'tis ; the most customers I remember 
myself to have, are, as your lordship knows, scholars, and 
now-a-days the most of them are become critics, bringing 
me home such paltry things to lay up for them, that I 
can hardly find them again. 

Phantastes, Jupiter, Jupiter, I had thought these flies 
had bit none but myself; do critics tickle you, i' faith? 

Mem. Very familiarly ; for they must know of me, for- 
sooth, how every idle word is written in all the musty 
moth-eaten manuscripts, kept in all the old libraries in 
every city, betwixt England and Peru. 

Common Sense. Indeed I have noted these times to 
affect antiquities more than is requisite. 

Mem. I remember in the age of Assaracus and Ninus, 
and about the wars of Thebes, and the siege of Troy, 
there were few things committed to my charge, but those 
that were well worthy the preserving ; but now every trifle 
must be wrapp'd up in the volume of eternity. A rich 
pudding- wife, or a cobbler, cannot die but I must immor- 
talize his name with an epitaph ; a dog cannot water in a 
nobleman's shoe, but it must be sprinkled into the chro- 
nicles ; so that I never could remember my treasure more 
full, and never emptier of honourable and true heroical 
actions." 

And again, Mendacio put in his claim with 
great success to many|works of uncommon merit. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 205 

" Appe. Thou boy ! how is this possible ? Thou art but 
a child, and there were sects of philosophy before thou 
wert born. 

Men. Appetitus, thou mistakest me ; I tell thee, three 
thousand years ago was Mendacio born in Greece, nursed 
in Crete, and ever since honoured everywhere : I'll be 
sworn I held old Homer's pen when he writ his Iliads and 
his Odysseys. 

Appe. Thou hadst need, for I hear say he was blind. 

Men. I helped Herodotus to pen some part of his 
Muses ; lent Pliny ink to write his history ; rounded Ra- 
belais in the ear when he historified Pantagruel ; as for 
Lucian, I was his genius. O, those two books, ' De Vera 
Historia/ however they go under his name, I'll be sworn I 
writ them every tittle. 

Appe. Sure as I am hungry, thou 'It have it for lying. 
But hast thou rusted this latter time for want of exercise ? 

Men. Nothing less. I must confess I would fain have 
jogged Stow and great Hollingshed on their elbows, when 
they were about their Chronicles ; and, as I remember. 
Sir John Mandevill's Travels, and a great part of the 
' Decades,' were of my doing ; but for the ' Mirror of Knight- 
hood,' ' Bevis of Southampton,' ' Palmerin of England,' 
'Amadis of Gaul,' * Huon de Bordeaux,' * Sir Guy of 
Warwick,' 'Martin Marprelate,' 'Robin Hood,' 'Garagan- 
tua,' 'Gerilion,' and a thousand such exquisite monuments 
as these, no doubt but they breathe in my breath up and 
down. " 

* The Merry Devil of Edmonton/ which has 
been sometimes attributed to Shakspeare, is as- 
suredly not unworthy of him. It is more 
likely, however, both from the style and sub- 
ject-matter, to have been Hey wood's than any 
other person's. It is perhaps the first example 
of sentimental comedy we have — romantic, 
sweet, tender, it expresses the feelings of ho- 



206 ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 

nour, love, and friendship in their utmost deli- 
cacy, enthusiasm, and purity. The names 
alone, Raymond Mounehersey, Frank Jer- 
ningham, Clare, Millisent, " sound silver sweet, 
like lovers' tongues by night." It sets out with 
a sort of story of Doctor Faustus, but this is 
dropt as jarring on the tender chords of the rest 
of the piece. The wit of ^ The Merry Devil of 
Edmonton' is as genuine as the poetry. Mine 
Host of the George is as good a fellow as Boni- 
face, and the deer-stealing scenes in the forest 
between him, Sir John the curate, Smug the 
smith, and Banks the miller, are " very honest 
knaveries," as Sir Hugh Evans has it. The 
air is delicate, and the deer, shot by their cross- 
bows, fall without a groan ! Frank Jerningham 
says to Clare, 

" The way lies right : hark, the clock strikes at Enfield : 
what's the hour ? 

Young Clare. Ten, the bell says. 

Jem. It was but eight when we set out from Cheston : 
Sir John and his sexton are at their ale to-night, the 
clock runs at random. 

Y. Clare. Nay, as sure as thou livest, the villanous 
vicar is abroad in the chase. The priest steals more 
venison than half the country. 

Jem. Millisent, how dost thou ? 

Mil. Sir, very well. 
I would to God we were at Brian's lodge." 

A volume might be written to prove this last 
answer Shakspeare's, in which the tongue says 
one thing in one line, and the heart contradicts 
it in the next ; but there were other writers liv- 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 207 

ing in the time of Shakspeare, who knew these 
subtle windings of the passions besides him, — 
though none so well as he ! 

' The Pinner of Wakefield, or George a 
Green,* is a pleasant interlude, of an early date, 
and the author unknown, in which kings and 
cobblers, outlaws and Maid Marians are " hail- 
fellow well met,'^ and in which the features of 
the antique world are made smiling and amiable 
enough. Jenkin, George a Greenes servant, 
is a notorious wag. Here is one of his pre- 
tended pranks. 

^'Jenkin, This fellow comes to me, 
And takes me by the bosom ; you slave, 
Said he, hold my horse, and look 
He takes no cold in his feet. 
No, marry shall he, sir, quoth I. 
I '11 lay my cloak underneath him. 
I took my cloak, spread it all along, 
And his horse on the midst of it. 

George. Thou clown, did'st thou set his horse 
upon thy cloak ? 

Jenh Aye, but mark how I served him. 
Madge and he w^as no sooner gone down into the ditch 
But I plucked out my knife, cut four holes in my cloak, 
and made his horse stand on the bare ground." 

The first part of ' Jeronymo' is an indiff*erent 
piece of work, and the second, or ' The Spanish 
Tragedy,^ by Kyd, is like unto it, except the 
interpolations idly said to have been added by 
Ben Jonson, relating to Jeronymo's phrensy, 
" which have all the melancholy madness of 
poetry, if not the inspiration.*' 



LECTURE VL 



on miscellaneous poems ; f. beaumont, p. 
fletcher, drayton, daniel, etc. ; sir p. 
Sidney's ' arcadia,' and other works. 

I shall, in the present Lecture, attempt to give 
some idea of the lighter productions of the 
Muse in the period before us, in order to show 
that grace and elegance are not confined entirely 
to later times, and shall conclude with some 
remarks on Sir Philip Sidney's * Arcadia.' 

I have already made mention of the lyrical 
pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher. It appears 
from his poems, that many of these were com- 
posed by Francis Beaumont, particularly the 
very beautiful ones in the tragedy of ^ The False 
One,' the ' Praise of Love' in that of ' Valen- 
tinian,' and another in * The Nice Valour, or 
Passionate Madman,' an * Address to Melan- 
choly,' which is the perfection of this kind of 
writing. ^ 

" Hence, all you vain delights ; 
As short as are the nights 
Wherein you spend your folly : 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 209 

There's nought in this life sweet, 

If man were wise to see't, 

But only melancholy, 

Oh, sweetest melancholy. 

Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, 

A sight that piercing mortifies ; 

A look that's fasten'd to the ground, 

A tongue chain'd up without a sound ; 

Fountain heads, and pathless groves, 

Places which pale passion loves : 

Moon-light walks, where all the fowls 

Are warmly hous'd, save bats and owls ; 

A midnight bell, a passing groan. 

These are the sounds we feed upon : 

Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley ; 

Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." 

It has been supposed (and not without every 
appearance of good reason) that this pensive 
strain, ''most musical, most melancholy," gave 
the first suggestion of the spirited introduction 
to Milton's ' II Penseroso/ 

** Hence, vain deluding joys. 
The brood of folly without father bred ! . . . 
But hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy. 
Hail, divinest melancholy, 
"Whose saintly visage is too bright 
To hit the sense of human sight," &c. 

The same writer thus moralises on the life of 
man, in a set of similes, as apposite as they are 
light and elegant. 

" Like to the falling of a star, 
Or as the flights of eagles are. 
Or like the fresh spring's gaudy hue, 
Or silver drops of morning dew, 

P 



210 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETCr 

Or like a wind that chafes the flood, 
Or bubbles which on water stood : 
/ E*en such is man, whose borrow'd light 
Is straight call'd in and paid to-night: — 
The wind blows out, the bubble dies ; 
The spring entombed in autumn lies ; 
The dew's dried up, the star is shot, 
The flight is past, and man forgot." 

^^ The silver foam which the wind sevei^ 
from the parted wave^^ is not more light or 
sparkling than this : the dove's downy pinion is 
not softer and smoother than the verse. We are 
too ready to conceive of the poetry of that day, 
as altogether old-fashioned, meagre, squalid, 
deformed, withered and wild in its attire, or as 
a sort of uncouth monster, like '^ grim-visaged, 
comfortless despair, '' mounted on a lumbering, 
unmanageable Pegasus, dragon-winged and 
leaden-hoofed; but it as often wore a sylph-like 
form with Attic vest, with fairy feet, and the 
butterfly's gaudy wings. The bees were said to 
have come, and built their hive in the mouth 
of Plato when a child ; and the fable might be 
transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont 
and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of 
five-and-twenty. One of these writers makes 
Bellario the Page say to Philaster, who 
threatens to take his life — 

" 'Tis not a life ; 



'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." 
But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 211 

growing reputation, cut off like a flower in its 
summer-pride, or like ''the lily on its stalk 
green,'' which makes us repine at fortune and 
almost at nature, that seems to set so little 
store by their greatest favourites. The life of 
poets is, or ought to be (judging of it from the 
light it lends to ours), a golden dream, full of 
brightness and sweetness, ''lapt in Elysium;'' 
and it gives one a reluctant pang to see the 
splendid vision, by which they are attended in 
their path of glory, fade like a vapour, and 
their sacred heads laid low in ashes, before the 
sand of common mortals has run out. Fletcher 
too was prematurely cut off by the plague. 
Raphael died at four-and-thirty, and Correggio 
at forty. Who can help wishing that they had 
lived to the age of Michael Angelo and Titian? 
Shakspeare might have lived another half cen- 
tury, enjoying fame and repose, ''now that 
his task was smoothly done," listening to the 
music of his name, and better still, of his own 
thoughts, without minding Rymer's abuse of 
"the tragedies of the last age." His native 
stream of Avon would then have flowed with 
softer murmurs to the ear, and his pleasant 
birth-place, Stmtford, would in that case have 
worn even a more gladsome smile than it does, 
to the eye of fancy ! — Poets, however, have a 
sort of privileged after-life, which does not fall 
to the common lot ; the rich and mighty are 
nothing but while they are living : their power 



212 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

ceases with them : but ^' the sons of memory^ 
the great heirs of fame" leave the best part of 
what was theirs, their thoughts, their verse, 
what they most delighted and prided themselves 
in, behind them — imperishable, incorruptible, 
immortal ! — Sir John Beaumont (the brother of 
our dramatist) whose loyal and religious effu- 
sions are not worth much, very feelingly 
laments his brother's ultimely death in an 
epitaph upon him. 

" Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death (to blame) 
Miscounted years, and measured age by fame ; 
So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines, 
Their praise grew swiftly ; so thy life declines, 
Thy Muse, the hearer*s Queen, the reader's Love, 
All ears, all hearts (but Death's) could please and 
move." 

Beaumont's verses addressed to Ben Jonson 
at the Mermaid are a pleasing record of their 
friendship, and of the way in which they 
*' fleeted the time carelessly" as well as studi- 
ously '' in the golden age" of our poetry. 

[Lines sent from the country with two unfinished Comedies, 
which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid. ] 

" The sun which doth the greatest comfort bring 
To absent friends, because the self-same thing 
They know they see, however absent, is 
Here our best hay-maker, (forgive me this, 
It is our country style) in this warm shine 
I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine : 
Oh, we have water mixt with claret lees, 
Drink apt i;0 bring in drier heresies 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 213 

Than here, good only for the sonnet's strain, 

With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain : — 

Think with one draught a man's invention fades, 

Two cups had quite spoil'd Homer's Iliads. 

'Tis liquor that will find out Sutcliffe's wit. 

Like where he will, and make him write worse yet : 

Fill'd with such moisture, in most grievous qualms * 

Did Robert Wisdom write his singing psalms : 

And so must I do this : and yet I think 

It is a potion sent us down to drink 

By special providence, keep us from fights, 

Make us not laugh when we make legs to knights ; 

'Tis this that keeps our minds fit for our states, 

A medicine to obey our magistrates. 

******** 

Methinks the little wit I had is lost 

Since I saw you, for wit is like a rest 

Held up at tennis, which men do the best 

With the best gamesters. What things have we seen 

Done at the Mermaid ! Hard words that have been 

So nimble, and so full of subtile flame, 

As if that every one from whence they came 

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 

And had resolved to live a fool the rest 

Of his dull life ; then when there hath been thrown 

Wit able enough to justify the town 

For three days past, wit that might warrant be 

For the whole city to talk foolishly, 

Till that were cancell'd ; and when that was gone. 

We left an air behind us, which alone 

Was able to make the two next companies 

Right witty, though but downright fools more wise." 

* So in Rochester's epigram: — 

** Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms, 
When they translated David's Psalms." 



214 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

I shall not in this place repeat Marlowe's 
celebrated song, < Come live with me and be 
my love,' nor Sir Walter Raleigh's no less 
celebrated answer to it (they may both be found 
in Walton's ' Complete Angler,' accompanied 
with scenery and remarks worthy of them); but 
I may quote, as a specimen of the high and 
romantic tone in which the poets of this age 
thought and spoke of each other, the ' Vision 
upon the Conceipt of the Faery Queen,' under- 
stood to be by Sir Walter Raleigh. 

" Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, 
Within that temple, where the vestal flame 
Was wont to burn, and passing by that way 
To see that burled dust of living fame, 
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept. 
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen : 
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept ; 
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen, 
For they this Queen attended, in whose stead 
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. 
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed. 
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce, 
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, 
And curst th' access of that celestial thief." 

A higher strain of compliment cannot well be 
conceived than this, which raises your idea 
even of that which it disparages in the com- 
parison, and makes you feel that nothing could 
have torn the writer from his idolatrous enthu- 
siasm for Petrarch and his Laura's tomb, but 
Spenser's magic verses and diviner ^ Faery 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 215 

Queen' — the one lifted above mortality, the 
other brought from the skies ! 

The name of Drummond of Hawthornden is 
in a manner entwined in cypher with that of 
Ben Jonson, He has not done himself or 
Jonson any credit by his account of their con- 
versation ; but his sonnets are in the highest 
degree elegant, harmonious, and striking. It 
appears to me that they are more in the manner 
of Petrarch than any others that we have, with 
a certain intenseness in the sentiment, an occa- 
sional glitter of thought, and uniform terseness 
of expression. The reader may judge for him- 
self from a few examples. 

" I know that all beneath the moon decays, 
And what by mortals in this world is wrought 
In tim^e's great periods shall return to nought ; 
That fairest states have fatal nights and days. 
I know that all the Muse's heavenly lays, 
With toil of spright which are so dearly bought, 
As idle sounds, of few or none are sought , 
That there is nothing lighter than vain praise. 
I know frail beauty's like the purple fxOw'r, 
To which one morn oft birth and death affords ; 
That love a jarring is of mind's accords, 
"WTiere sense and will bring under reason's pow'r. 
Know what I list, this all cannot me move, 
But that, alas ! I both must write and love." 

Another — 

*^ Fair moon, who with thy cold and silver shine 
Mak'st sweet the horror of the dreadful night, 
Delighting the weak eye with smiles divine. 
Which Phoebus dazzles with his too much light ; 



216 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Bright queen of the first Heav'n, if in thy shrine 

By turning oft, and Heav'n's eternal might, 

Thou hast not yet that once sweet fire of thine, 

Endymion, forgot, and lovers' plight : 

If cause like thine may pity breed in thee. 

And pity somewhat else to it obtain. 

Since thou hast power of dreams as well as he 

That holds the golden rod and mortal chain ; 

Now while she sleeps,* in doleful guise her show. 

These tears, and the black map of all my woe." 

This is the eleventh sonnet: the twelfth is 
full of vile and forced conceits, without any 
sentiment at all ; such as calling the sun '' the 
goldsmith of the stars," '' the enameller of the 
moon,'' and " the Apelles of the flowers." 
This is as bad as Cowley or Sir Philip Sid- 
ney. Here is one that is worth a million of 
such quaint devices. 

" To the Nightingale. 
Dear chorister, who from these shadows sends,f 
Ere that the blushing morn dare show her light. 
Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends 
(Become all ear:):) stars stay to hear thy plight. 
If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends, 
Who ne'er (not in a dream) did taste delight. 
May thee importune who like case pretends. 
And seem'st to joy in woe, in woe's despite : 
Tell me (so may thou milder fortune try. 
And long, long sing !) for what thou thus complains,t 
Since winter 's gone, and sun in dappled sky 
Enamour'd smiles on woods and flow'ry plains? 



* His mistress. 

t Scotch for send*st ; for complain'st, &c. 

I " I was all ear ;" see Milton's ' Comus.* 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 217 

The bird, as if my questions did her move, 

With trembling wings sigh'd forth, * I love, I love.' " 

Or if a mixture of the Delia Crusean style be 
allowed to enshrine the true spirit of love and 
poetry, we have it in the following address to 
the river Forth, on which his mistress had 
embarked. 

" Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a crystal plain. 
Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face 
Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace 
The boat that earth's perfection doth contain. 
Winds wonder, and through wondering hold your peace, 
Or if that you your hearts cannot restrain 
From sending sighs, feeling a lover's case, 
Sigh, and in her fair hair yourselves enchain. 
Or take these sighs, which absence makes arise 
From my oppressed breast, and fill the sails. 
Or some sweet breath new brought from Paradise. 
The floods do smile, love o'er the winds prevails, 
And yet huge waves arise ; the cause is this. 
The ocean strives with Forth the boat to kiss." 

This to the English reader will express the 
very soul of Petrarch, the molten breath of 
sentiment converted into the glassy essence of a 
set of glittering but still graceful conceits. 

^' The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets," 
and the critic that tastes poetry ^^ruin meets." 
His feet are clogged with its honey, and his 
eyes blmded with its beauties ; and he forgets 
his proper vocation, which is to buzz and sting. 
I am afraid of losing my way in Drummond's 
^'sugar'd sonnetting;" and have determined 



218 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

more than once to break off abruptly ; but an- 
other and another tempts the rash hand and 
curious eye, which I am loth not to give, and 
I give it accordingly : for if I did not write 
these Lectures to please myself, I am at least 
sure I should please nobody else. In fact, I 
conceive that what I have undertaken to do in 
this and former cases, is merely to read over 
a set of authors with the audience, as I would do 
with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, 
to explain an objection ; or if a remark or a 
theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the 
subject, but neither to tii-e him nor puzzle my- 
self with pedantic rules and pragmatical formu- 
las of criticism that can do no good to anybody, 
I do not come to the task with a pair of com- 
passes or a ruler in my pocket, to see whether a 
poem is round or square, or to measure its me- 
chanical dimensions, like a meter and alnager of 
poetry : it is not in my bond to look after ex- 
ciseable articles or contraband wares, or to exact 
severe penalties and forfeitures for trifling over- 
sights, or to give formal notice of violent 
breaches of the three unities, of geography and 
chronology ; or to distribute printed stamps 
and poetical licences (with blanks to be filled 
up) on Mount Parnassus. I do not come 
armed from top to toe with colons and semi- 
colons, with glossaries and indexes, to adjust 
the spelling or reform the metre, or to prove by 
everlasting contradiction and querulous impa- 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 219 

tience, that former commentators did not know 
the meaning of their author, any more than I 
do, who am angry at them, only because I am 
dut of humour with myself— -as if the genius of 
poetry lay buried under the rubbish of the 
press ; and the critic was the dwarf-enchanter 
who was to release its airy form from being 
stuck through with blundering points and mis- 
placed commas ; or to prevent its vital powers 
from being worm-eaten and consumed, letter by 
letter, in musty manuscripts and black-letter 
print. T do not think that is the way to learn 
" the gentle craft" of poesy, or to teach it to 
others : — to imbibe or to communicate its spi- 
rit ; which, if it does not disentangle itself and 
soar above the obscure and trivial researches of 
antiquarianism, is no longer itself, '' a phoenix 
gazed by all.'' At least, so it appeared to me ; 
it is for others to judge whether I was right or 
wrong. In a word, I have endeavoured to 
feel what was good, and to '^ give a reason for 
the faith that was in me,'' when necessary, and 
when in my power. This is what I have done, 
and what I must continue to do. 

To return to Drummond. — I cannot but think 
that his sonnets come as near as almost any 
others to the perfection of this kind of writing, 
which should embody a sentiment, and every 
shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and 
place and humour, with the extravagance or 
lightness of a momentary impression, and 



220 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

should, when lengthened out into a series, form 
a history of the wayward moods of the poet's 
mind, the turns of his fate ; and imprint the 
smile or frown of his mistress in indelible cha- 
racters on the scattered leaves. I will give the 
two following, and have done with this au-* 
thor. 

" In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs, 
To quench the fever burning in my veins : 
In vain (love's pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains 
I over- run ; vain help long absence brings. 
In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains 
To fly, and place my thoughts on other things. 
Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings. 
The more I move the greater are my pains. 
Desire, alas ! desire a Zeuxis new. 
From th' orient borrowing gold, from western skies 
Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes 
In every place her hair, sweet look and hue ; 
That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain ; 
My life lies in those eyes which have me slain." 

The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch's 
description of the bower where he first saw 
Laura. 

" Alexis, here she stay'd among these pines, 
Sweet hermitress, she did alone repair : 
Here did she spread the treasure of her hair. 
More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines ; 
Here sat she by these musked eglantines ; 
The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear : 
Her voice did sweeten here thy sugar'd lines. 
To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear. 
She here me first perceiv'd, and here a morn 
Of bright carnations did o'erspread her face : 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 221 

Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born, 
Here first I got a pledge of promised grace ; 
But ah ! what serves to have been made happy so, 
Sith past pleasures double but new woe ! " 

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond's 
sonnets to Spenser's ; and they leave Sydney's, 
picking their way through verbal intricacies 
and '' thorny queaches*," at an immeasurable 
distance behind. Drummond's other poems 
have great though not equal merit; and he 
may be fairly set down as one of our old English 
classics. 

Ben Jonson's detached poetry I like much, 
as indeed I do all about him, except when he 
degraded himself by ^' the laborious foolery" of 
some of his farcical characters, which he could 
not deal with sportively, and only made stupid 
and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I 
have said, more than once, in disparagement of 
Ben Jonson's comic humour ; but I think he 
was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not 
improbably) alluded to it in the following speech 
of Crites in ' Cynthia's Revels.' 

" Oh, how despised and base a thing is man, 
If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts 
Above the strain of flesh ! But how more cheap, 
When even his best and understanding part 
(The crown and strength of all his faculties) 
Floats like a dead-drown'd body, on the stream 
Of vulgar humour, mix'd with commonest dregs: 

* Chapman's Hymn to Pan. 



222 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

I suffer for their guilt now ; and my soul 

(Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes) 

Is hurt with mere intention on their IbUies. 

Why will I view them then ? my sense might ask me ; 

Or is't a rarity or some new object 

That strains my strict observance to this point : 

But such is the perverseness of our nature, 

That if we once but fancy levity, 

( How antic and ridiculous soever 

It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought 

Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it," &c. 

Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self- 
reflection enough to apply this to himself. His 
tenaciousness on the score of critical objections 
does not prove that he was not conscious of 
them himself J but the contrary. The greatest 
egotists are those whom it is impossible to offend, 
because they are wholly and incurably blind to 
their own defects ; or if they could be made to 
see them, would instantly convert them into so 
many beauty-spots and ornamental graces. Ben 
Jonson's fugitive and lighter pieces are not de- 
void of the characteristic merits of that class of 
composition ; but still often in the happiest of 
them, there is a specific gravity in the author's 
pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his subject, 
though buoyed up for a time with art and painted 
plumes, and produces a strange mixture of the 
mechanical and fanciful, of poetry and prose, in 
his songs and odes. For instance, one of his 
most airy effusions is the ' Triumph of his Mis- 
tress : ' yet there are some lines in it that seem 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 223 

inserted almost by way of burlesque. It is^ 
however, well worth repeating. 

** See the chariot at hand here of love, 
Wherein my lady rideth ! 
Each that draws it is a swan or a dove ; 
And well the car love guideth ! 
As she goes all hearts do duty 

Unto her beauty : 
And enamour'd, do wash so they might 

But enjoy such a sight. 
That they still were to run by her side, 
Through swords, through seas, whither she w^ould ride. 
Do but look on her eyes, they do light 

All that love's world compriseth ! 
Do but look on her hair, it Is bright 

As love's star when it riseth ! 
Do but mark, her forehead's smoother 

Than words that soothe her : 
And from her arch'd brows, such a grace 

Sheds itself through the face. 
As alone their triumphs to the life 
All the gain, all the good of the elements' strife. 

Have you seen but a bright lily grow, 

Before rude hands have touched it ? 

Ha' you mark'd but the fall of the snow 

Before the soil hath smutch'd it ? 

Ha' you felt the wool of heaver ? 

Or swan's down ever ? 

Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar ? 

Or the nard in the fire ? 

Or have tasted the bag of the bee ? 

Oh, so white ! Oh, so soft ! Oh, so sweet is she ! " 

His ' Discourse with Cupid,' which follows, 
is infinitely delicate and piguanty and without 



224 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

one single blemish. It is a perfect ^^nest of 
splcery.'^ 

" Noblest Charis, you that are 
Both my fortune and my star ! 
And do govern more my blood, 
Than the various moon the flood ! 
Hear, what late discourse of you. 
Love and I have had ; and true. 
'Mongst my Muses finding me, 
Where he chanc'd your name to see 
Set, and to this softer strain ; 
* Sure,' said he, ' If I have brain. 
This here sung can be no other, 
By description, but my mother ! 
So hath Homer prais'd her hair ; 
So Anacreon drawn the air 
Of her face, and made to rise. 
Just about her sparkling eyes, 
Both her brows bent like my bow. 
By her looks I do her know, 
Which you call my shafts. And see ! 
Such my mother's blushes be. 
As the bath your verse discloses 
In her cheeks, of milk and roses ; 
Such as oft I wanton in. 
And, above her even chin, 
Have you plac'd the bank of kisses. 
Where you say, men gather blisses, 
Rip'ned with a breath more sweet, 
Than when flowers and west-winds meet. 
Nay, her white and polish'd neck, 
With the lace that doth it deck, 
Is my mother's ! hearts of slain 
Lovers, made into a chain ! 
And between each rising breast 
Lies the valley, call'd my nest, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 225 

Where I sit and proyne my wings 
After flight ; and put new stings 
To my shafts ! Her very name 
With my mother's is the same.' — 

* I confess all,' I replied, 

* And the glass hangs by her side, 
And the girdle 'bout her waist, 
All is Venus : save unchaste. 
But, alas ! thou seest the least 
Of her good, who is the best 

Of her sex ; but could st thou. Love, 
Call to mind the forms that strove 
For the apple, and those three 
Make in one, the same were she. 
For this beauty yet doth hide 
Something more than thou hast spied. 
Outward grace weak love beguiles : 
She is Venus when she smiles, 
But she's Juno when she walks, 
And Minerva when she talks.' " 

In one of the songs in ' Cynthia's Revels,' we 
find, amidst some very pleasing imagery, the 
origin of a celebrated line in modern poetry — 

'•' Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip," &c. 

This has not even the merit of originality, 
which is hard upon it. Ben Jonson had said 
two hundred years before, 

" Oh, I could still 
( Like melting snow upon some craggy hill) 

Drop, drop, drop, drop, 
Since nature's pride is now a withered daffodil." 

His ' Ode to the Memory of Sir Lucius Gary 
and Sir H. Morrison ' has been much admired, 

Q 



226 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

but I cannot but think it one of his most fantas- 
tical and perverse performances. 

I cannot, for instance, reconcile myself to 
such stanzas as these. 

" Of which we priests and poets say 
Such truths as we expect for happy men, 
And there he lives with memory ; and Ben 

The Stand, 
Jonson, who sung this of hira, ere he went 
Himself to rest, 

Or taste a part of that full joy he meant 
To have exprest, 
In this bright asterism ; 
Where it were friendship's schism 
(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry) 
To separate these twi- 
Lights, the Dioscori ; 
And keep the one half from his Harry. 
But fate doth so alternate the design, 
While that in Heaven, this light on earth doth shine." 

This seems as if because he cannot without 
diflSculty write smoothly, he becomes rough and 
crabbed in a spirit of defiance, like those persons 
who cannot behave well in company, and affect 
rudeness to show their contempt for the opinions 
of others. 

His ' Epistles' are particulary good, equally 
full of strong sense and sound feeling. They 
show that he was not without friends, whom he 
esteemed, and by whom he was deservedly 
esteemed in return. The controversy started 
about his character is an idle one, carried on in 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 227 

the mere spirit of contradiction, as if he were 
either made up entirely of gall, or dipped in 
*^the milk of human kindness." There is no 
necessity or ground to suppose either. He was 
no doubt a sturdy, plain-spoken, honest, well- 
disposed man^ inclining more to the severe than 
the amiable side of things ; but his good qua- 
lities, learning, talents, and convivial habits 
preponderated over his defects of temper or 
manners ; and in a course of friendship some 
diiference of character, even a little roughness 
or acidity, may relish to the palate ; and olives 
may be served up with effect as well as sweet- 
meats. Ben Jonson, even by his quarrels and 
jealousies, does not seem to have been curst with 
the last and damning disqualification for friend- 
ship, — heartless indifference. He was also what 
is understood by a good fellorv, fond of good 
cheer and good company : and the first step for 
others to enjoy your society, is for you to enjoy 
theirs. If any one can do without the world, 
it is certain that the world can do quite as w^ell 
without him. His ' Verses Inviting a Friend to 
Supper' give us as familiar an idea of his pri- 
vate habits and character, as his ^ Epistle to 
Michael Drayton,' that to Selden, &c. ; his 
* Lines to the Memory of Shakspeare,' and his 
noble prose ' Eulogy on Lord Bacon,' in his 
disgrace, do a favourable one. 

Among the best of these (perhaps the very 
best) is the ' Address to Sir Robert Wroth,' which 



228 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

besides its manly moral sentiments, conveys a 
strikingly picturesque description of rural sports 
and manners at this interesting period. 

" How blest art thou, canst love the country, Wroth, 
Whether by choice, or fate, or both ! 

And though so near the city and the court. 

Art ta'en with neither's vice nor sport : 

That at great times, art no ambitious guest 

Of sheriff's dinner, or of mayor's feast ; 
, Nor com'st to view the better cloth of state, 

The richer hangings, or the crown-plate ; 

Nor throng'st (when masquing is) to have a sight 

Of the short bravery of the night ; 

To view the jewels, stuffs, the pains, the wit 

There wasted, some not paid for yet ! 

But canst at home, in thy securer rest, 

Live with unbought provision blest ; 

Free from proud porches or their gilded roofs, 

'Mongst lowing herds and solid hoofs : 

Along the curled woods and painted meads, 

Through which a serpent river leads 

To some cool courteous shade, which he calls his, 

And makes sleep softer than it is ! 

Or if thou list the night in watch to break, 

A'bed canst hear the loud stag speak. 

In spring oft roused for their master's sport. 

Who for it makes thy house his court ; 

Or with thy friends, the heart of all the year, 

Divid'st upon the lesser deer ; 

In autumn, at the partrich mak'st a flight. 

And giv'st thy gladder guests the sight ; 

And in the winter hunt'st the flying hare, 

More for thy exercise than fare ; 

While all that follows, their glad ears apply 

To the full greatness of the cry : 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 229 

Or hawking at the river or the bush, 

Or shooting at the greedy thrush, 

Thou dost with some delight the day out-wear, 

Although the coldest of the year ! 

The whilst the several seasons thou hast seen 

Of flow'ry fields, of copses green, 

The mowed meadows, with the fleeced sheep, 

And feasts that either shearers keep ; 

The ripened ears yet humble in their height. 

And furrows laden with their weight ; 

The apple-harvest that doth longer last ; 

The hogs return'd home fat from mast ; 

The trees cut out in log ; and those boughs made 

A fire now, that lent a shade ! 

Thus Pan and Sylvan having had their rites, 

Comus puts in for new delights ; 

And fills thy open hall with mirth and cheer, 

As if in Saturn's reign it were ; 

Apollo's harp and Hermes' lyre resound, 

Nor are the Muses strangers found : 

The rout of rural folk come thronging in 

(Their rudeness then is thought no sin). 

Thy noblest spouse affords them welcome grace ; 

And the great heroes of her race 

Sit mixt with loss of state or reverence. 

Freedom doth with degree dispense. 

The jolly wassail walks the often round. 

And in their cups their cares are drown'd: 

They think not then which side the cause shall leese, 

Nor how to get the lawyer fees. 

Such, and no other, was that cige of old. 

Which boasts t' have had the head of gold. 

And such since thou canst make thine own content. 

Strive, Wroth, to live long innocent. 

Let others watch in guilty arms, and stand 

The fury of a rash command. 



230 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Go enter breaches, meet the cannon's rage. 

That they may sleep with scars in age, 

And show their feathers shot and colours torn, 
; And brag that they were therefore born. 

Let this man sweat, and wrangle at the bar 

For every price in every jar. 

And change possessions oftener with his breath, 

Than either money, war, or death : 
! Let him, than hardest sires, more disinherit. 

And eachwhere boast it as his merit, 

To blow up orphans, widows, and their states ; 

And think his power doth equal Fate's. 

Let that go heap a mass of wretched wealth, 

Purchas'd by rapine, worse than stealth. 

And brooding o'er it sit, with broadest eyes, 

Not doing good, scarce when he dies. 

Let thousands more go flatter vice, and win, 

By being organs to great sin ; 

Get place and honour, and be glad to keep 

The secrets that shall break their sleep : 

And, so they ride in purple, eat in plate. 

Though poison, think it a great fate. 

But thou, my Wroth, if I can truth apply, 

Shalt neither that, nor this envy : 

Thy peace is made ; and, when man's state is well, 

'Tis better, if he there can dwell. 

God wisheth none should wrack on a strange shelf; 

To him man's dearer than t' himself. 

And, howsoever, we may think things sweet, 

He always gives what he knows meet ; 

Which who can use is happy : such be thou. 

Thy morning's and thy evening's vow 

Be thanks to him, and earnest prayer, to find 

A body sound, with sounder mind ; 

To do thy country service, thyself right ; 

That neither want do thee aff'right, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 231 

Nor death ; but when thy latest sand is spent, 
Thou mayst think life a thing but lent/' 

Of all the poetical Epistles of this period, 
however, that of Daniel to the Countess of 
Cumberland, for weight of thought and depth 
of feeling, bears the palm. The reader will 
not peruse this effusion with less interest or 
pleasure, from knowing that it is a favourite 
with Mr Wordsworth. 

** He that of such a height hath built his mind. 
And rear'd the dwelling of his thoughts so strong. 
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
Of his resolved powers ; nor all the wind 
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
His settled peace, or to disturb the same : 
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may 
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey ! 
And with how free an eye doth he look down 
Upon these lower regions of turmoil, 
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat 
On flesh and blood : where honour, pow'r, renown, 
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; 
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet 
As frailty doth ; and only great doth seem 
To little minds, who do it so esteem. 

He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars 
But only as on stately robberies ; 
Where evermore the fortune that prevails 
Must be the right : the ill-succeeding mars 
The fairest and the best-fac'd enterprize. 
Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails : 
Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still 
Conspires with pow'r, whose cause must not be ill. 
He sees the face of right t' appear as manifold 



232 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC* 

As are the passions of uncertain man ; 
Who puts it in all colours, all attires, 
To serve his ends, and make his courses hold^ 
He sees, that let deceit work what it can, 
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires ; 
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet 
All disappoint, and mocks this smoke of wit. 

Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder-cracks 
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow 
Of pow'r, that proudly sits on others' crimes, 
Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks^ 
The storms of sad confusion, that may grow 
Up in the present for the coming times. 
Appal not him ; that hath no side at all, 
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall. 

Although his heart (so near allied to earth) 
Cannot but pity the perplexed state 
Of troublous and distress'd mortality. 
That thus make way unto the ugly birth 
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget 
Affliction upon imbecility r 
Yet seeing thus the course of things must run. 
He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done. 

And whilst distraught ambition compasses, 
And is encompass'd ; whilst as craft deceives, 
And is deceiv'd ; whilst man doth ransack man^ 
And builds on blood, and rises by distress ; 
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves 
To great expecting hopes ; he looks thereon, 
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye. 
And bears no venture in impiety." 

Michael Draytoi/s ' Poly-Olbion' is a work 
of great length and of unabated freshness and 
vigour m itself, though the monotony of the 
subject tires the reader. He describes each 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 233 

place with the accuracy of a topographer, and 
the enthusiasm of a poet, as if his muse were 
the very genius loci. His ' Heroical Epistles ' 
are also excellent. He has a few lighter pieces, 
but none of exquisite beauty or grace. His 
mind is a rich marly soil that produces an 
abundant harvest, and repays the husbandman's 
toil; but few flaunting flowers, the garden's 
pride, grow in it, nor any poisonous weeds. 

P. Fletcher's ^Purple Island' is nothing 
but a long enigma, describing the body of a 
man, with the heart and veins, and the blood 
circulating in them, under the fantastic desig- 
nation of ' The Purple Island.' 

The other poets whom I shall mention, and 
who properly belong to the age immediately 
following, were William Browne, Carew, Cra- 
shaw, Herrick, and Marvell. Browne was a 
pastoral poet, with much natural tenderness 
and sweetness, and a good deal of allegorical 
quaintness and prolixity. Carew was an ele- 
gant court-trifler. Herrick was an amorist, 
with perhaps more fancy than feeling, though 
he has been called by some the English Ana- 
creon. Crashaw was a hectic enthusiast in 
religion and in poetry, and erroneous in both. 
Marvell deserves to be remembered as a true 
poet as well as patriot, not in the best of times. 
I will, however, give short specimens from 
each of these writers, that the reader may judge 
for himself, and be led by his own curiosity, 



234 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

rather than my recommendation, to consult the 
originals. Here is one by T. Carew. 

" Asifone no more where Jove bestows, 
When June is past, the fading rose : 
For in your beauties, orient deep 
These flow'rs, as in their causes, sleep. 

Ask me no more, whither do stray 
The golden atoms of the day ; 
For in pure love. Heaven did prepare 
Those powders to enrich your hair. 

Ask me no more, whither doth haste 
The nightingale, v/hen May is past ; 
For in your sweet dividing throat 
She winters, and keeps warm her note. 

Ask me no more, where those stars light, 
That downwards fall in dead of night ; 
For in your eyes they sit, and there 
Fixed become, as in their sphere. 

Ask me no more, if east or west 
The phoenix builds her spicy nest ; 
For unto you at last she flies. 
And in your fragrant bosom dies. " 

' The Hue and Cry of Love,' ' The Epitaphs 
on Lady Mary Villiers,' and 'The Friendly 
Reproof to Ben Jonson for his angry Farewell 
to the Stage,* are in the author's best manner. 
We may perceive, however, a frequent mixture 
of the superficial and common-place, with far- 
fetched and improbable conceits. 

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 235 

expectations I had formed of him. He is in a 
manner a modern discovery, and so far has the 
freshness of antiquity about him. He is not 
trite and thread-bare. But neither is he likely 
to become so. He is a writer of epigrams, not 
of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I 
think little of the spirit of love or wine. From 
his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one 
might take him for a lapidary instead of a 
poet. One of his pieces is entitled 

" The Rock of Rubies, and the Quarry of Pearls. 

Some ask'd me where the rubies grew ; 

And nothing I did say ; 
But with my finger pointed to 

The lips of Julia. 

Some ask'd how pearls did grow, and where ; 

Then spoke I to my girl 
To part her lips, and show them there 

The quarreletsof pearl." 

Now this is making a petrefaction both of 
love and poetry. 

His poems, from their number and size, are 
'^ like the moats that play in the sun's beams ;" 
that glitter to the eye of fancy, but leave no 
distinct impression on the memory. The two 
best are a translation of Anacreon, and a suc- 
cessful and spirited imitation of him. 

'* The Wounded Cupid. 

Cupid, as he lay among 
Roses, by a bee was stung. 



236 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Whereupon, in anger flying 

To his mother said thus, crying. 

Help, oh help, your boy's a-dying ! 

And why, my pretty lad ? said she. 

Then, blubbering, replied he, 

A winged snake has bitten me, 

Which country people call a bee. 

At which she smiled ; then, with her hairs 

And kisses drying up his tears, 

Alas, said she, my wag ! if this 

Such a pernicious torment is ; 

Come, tell me then, how great 's the smart 

Of those thou woundest with thy dart ? " 

' The Captive Bee, or the Little Filcher,' is 
his own. 

" As Julia once a slumbering lay, 
It chanced a bee did fly that way. 
After a dew, or dew-like show'r, 
To tipple freely in a flow'r. 
For some rich flow*r he took the lip 
Of Julia, and began to sip : 
But when he felt he suck'd from thence 
Honey, and in the quintessence, 
He drank so much he scarce could stir ; 
So Julia took the pilferer. 
And thus surpris'd, as filchers use, 
He thus began himself to excuse : 
Sweet lady-flow'r ! I never brought 
Hither the least one thieving thought ; 
But taking those rare lips of your's 
For some fresh, fragrant, luscious flow'rs, 
I thought I might there take a taste, 
Where so much syrup ran at waste ; 
Besides, know this, I never sting 
The flow'r that gives me nourishing ; 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 237 

But with a kiss of thanks do pay 
For honey that I bear away. 
This said, he laid his Httle scrip 
Of honey 'fore her ladyship : 
And told her, as some tears did fall, 
That that he took, and that was all. 
At which she smil'd, and bid him go. 
And take his bag, but thus much know, 
When next he came a pilfering so, 
He should from her full lips derive 
Honey enough to fill his hive." 

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise, 
as appears to me his due, on another occasion ; 
but the public are deaf, except to proof or to 
their own prejudices, and I will therefore give 
an example of the sweetness and power of his 

verse. 

'* To his Coy Mistress. 
Had we but world enough, and time, 
This coyness, lady, were no crime. 
We would sit down and think which way 
To w^alk, and pass our long love's day. 
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side 
Should'st rubies find : I by the tide 
Of Humber would complain. I would 
Love you ten years before the flood ; 
And you should, if you please, refuse 
Till the conversion of the Jews. 
My vegetable love should grow 
Vaster than empires, and more slow. 
An hundred years should go to praise ; 

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze ; 
Two hundred to adore each breast ; 
But thirty thousand to the rest. 
An age at least to every part. 
And the last age should show your heart. 



238 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

For, lady, you deserve this state ; 
Nor would I love at lower rate. 

But at my back I always hear 
Time's winged chariot hurrying near: 
And yonder all before us lye 
Deserts of vast eternity. 
Thy beauty shall no more be found ; 
Nor in thy marble vault shall sound 
My echoing song ; then worms shall try 
That long preserved virginity : 
And your quaint honour turn to dust ; 
And into ashes all my lust. 
The grave's a fine and private place, 
But none, I think, do there embrace. 

Now, therefore, while the youthful hue 
Sits on thy skin, like morning dew, 
And while thy willing soul transpires 
At every pore with instant fires, 
Now let us sport us while we may ; 
And now, like amorous birds of prey. 
Rather at once our time devour. 
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd pow'r. 
Let us roll all our strength, and all 
Our sweetness up into one ball ; 
And tear our pleasures with rough strife. 
Thorough the iron gates of life. 
Thus, though we cannot make our sun 
Stand still, yet we will make him run, " 

In Browne's ' Pastorals/ notwithstanding the 
weakness and prolixity of his general plan, there 
are repeated examples of single lines and pas- 
sages of extreme b^^auty and delicacy, both of 
sentiment and description, such as the following 
Picture of Nig-ht. 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 239 

" Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd's song, 
And silence girt the woods : no warbling tongue 
Talk'd to the echo ; satyrs broke their dance, 
And all the upper world lay in a trance, 
Only the curled streams soft chidings kept ; 
And little gales that from the green leaf swept 
Dry summer's dust, in fearful whisp'rings stirr'd, 
As loth to waken any singing bird." 

Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not 
sparingly, over the green lap of nature through 
almost every page of our author's writings. His 
description of the squirrel hunted by mischie- 
vous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows 
like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable 
others might be quoted. 

His ' Philarete ' (the fourth song of the 
' Shepherd's Pipe') has been said to be the origin 
of ^ Lycidas 5' but there is no resemblance, except 
that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a 
friend. ' The Inner Temple Mask' has also 
been made the foundation of ' Comus,' with as 
little reason. But so it is : if an author is once 
detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of 
plagiarism ever after; and every writer that 
finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made 
to set up his claim to originality against him. 
A more serious charge of this kind has been 
urged against the principal character in ^ Para- 
dise Lost' (that of Satan), which is said to have 
been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of 
this we may be able to form some judgment, 
by a comparison with Crashaw's translation of 



240 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Marino's * Sospetto d'Herode/ The description 
of Satan alluded to is given in the following 
Stanzas : — 

" Below the bottom of the great abyss, 

There where one centre reconciles all things. 
The world's profound heart pants ; there placed is 
Mischiefs old master ; close about him clings 
A curl'd knot of embracing snakes, that kiss 
His correspondent cheeks ; these loathsome strings 
Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties 
Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies. 

The judge of torments, and the king of tears. 
He fills a burnish'd throne of quenchless fire ; 
And for his own fair robes of light, he wears 
A gloomy mantle of dark flames ; the tire 
That crowns his hated head, on high appears ; 
Where seven tall horns (his empire's pride) aspire ; 
And, to make up hell's majesty, each horn 
Seven crested hydras horribly adorn. 

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night, 
Startle the dull air with a dismal red ; 
Such his fell glances as the fatal light 
Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead. 
From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite 
Of hell's own stink, a worser stench is spread. 
His breath hell's lightning is ; and each deep groan 
Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone. 

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation 

Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath ; 

Whose unconsum'd consumption preys upon 

The never-dying life of a long death. 

In this sad house of slow destruction 

(His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath 

A mass of woes ; his teeth for torment gnash. 

While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash. " 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 241 

This portrait of monkish superstition does 
not equal the grandeur of Milton's description : 

" His form had not yet lost 

All her original brightness, nor appeared 
Less than archangel ruin'd and the excess 
Of glory obscured.'* 
Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the 
vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and 
clothed him with other greater and intellectual 
terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and 
converting the grotesque and deformed into the 
ideal and classical. Certainly, Milton's mind 
rose superior to all others in this respect, on the 
outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, 
in not confounding the depravity of the will 
with physical distortion, or supposing that the 
distinctions of good and evil were only to be 
subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In 
the subsequent stanzas, we however find the 
traces of some of Milton's boldest imagery, 
though its effect be injured by the incongruous 
mixture above stated. 
" Struck with these great concurrences of things, * 
Symptoms so deadly unto death and him : 
Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings 
Eternally bind each rebellious limb, 
He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings, 
Which like two bosom'd sailsf embrace the dim 

* Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the 
birth of the Messiah. 
f " He spreads his saiUbroad vans, " — * Par. Lost,' b. ii^ 

1. m. 



242 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Air, with a dismal shade, but all in vain : ' 

Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain. 

While thus heav'n's counsels, by the low 
Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well. 
He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow 
Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell. 
With his foul claws he fenced his furrow'd brow. 
And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell 
Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night.'* 

The poet adds — 

" The while his twisted tail he gnaw'd for spite." 

There is no keeping in this. This action of 
meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the 
most contemptible creatures, takes away from 
the terror and power just ascribed to the prince 
of Hell, and implied in the nature of the conse- 
quences attributed to his every movement of 
mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to himself is 
more beautiful and more in character at the 
same time. 

*' Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves 
Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given ? 
The nimblest of the lightning- winged loves ? 
The fairest and the first-born smile of heav'n? 
Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves, 
Reverently circled by the lesser seven : 
Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes 
Opprest the common people of the skies ? 
Ah ! wretch ! what boots it to cast back thine eyes 
Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shows ?" &c. 

This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is 
also true pathos and morality : for it interests 



ON MISCELLA.NEOUS POEMS, ETC. 243 

the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea 
of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with 
the loss of virtue ; but from the horns and tail 
of the brute-demon, imagination cannot reascend 
to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by 
the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot 
without a violent effort picture to itself. 

In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief 
minister of Satan, there is also a considerable 
approach to Milton's description of Death and 
Sin, the portress of hell-gates. 

" Thrice howrd the caves of night, and thrice the sound. 
Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes, 
Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound : 
At last her listening ears the noise o'ertakes. 
She lifts her sooty lamps, and looking round, 
A general hiss,* from the whole tire of snakes 
Rebounding through hell's inmost caverns came. 
In answer to her formidable name. 

'Mbngst all the palaces in hell's command, 
No one so merciless as this of hers, 
The adamantine doors for ever stand 
Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears. 
The walls' inexorable steel, no hand 
Of time, or teeth of hungry ruin fears." 

On the whole, this poem, though Milton has 

undoubtedly availed himself of many ideas and 

passages in it, raises instead of lowering our 

* conception of him, by showing how much more 

he added to it than he has taken from it. 

* See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, 
in book x of * Paradise Lost.' 



244 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

Crashaw's translation of Strada's description 
of the contention between a nightingale and a 
musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not 
equal to Ford's version of the same story in his 
' Lover's Melancholy/ One line may serve as 
a specimen of delicate quaintness, and of Cra- 
shaw's style in general. 

" And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings." 

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I 
cannot acquire a taste. As Mr Burke said, 
''he could not love the French Republic" — so 
I may say, that I cannot love ' The Countess of 
Pembroke's Arcadia,' with all my good-will 
to it. It will not do for me, however, to imi- 
tate the summary petulance of the epigram- 
matist : 

" The reason why I cannot tell. 
But I don't hke thee, Dr Fell." 

I must give my reasons, ''on compulsion," 
for not speaking well of a person like Sir 
Philip Sidney — 
" The soldier's, scholar's, courtier^s eye, tongue, sword, 

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form ;" 

jthe splendour of whose personal accomplish- 
ments, and of whose wide-spread fame, wa^, 
in his life-time, 

" Like a gate of steel. 

Fronting the sun, that renders back 
His figure and his heat " — 

a .writer, too, who was Tiiniversally read and 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 245 

enthusiastically admired for a century after his 
death, and who has been admired with scarce 
less enthusiastic, but with a more distant ho- 
mage, for another century, after ceasing to be 
read. 

We have lost the art of reading, or the pri- 
vilege of writing, voluminously, since the days 
of Addison. Learning no longer weaves the 
interminable page with patient drudgery, nor 
ignorance pores over it with implicit faith. As 
authors multiply in number, books diminish in 
size; we cannot now, as formerly, swallow 
libraries whole in a single folio : solid quarto 
has given place to slender duodecimo, and the 
dingy letter-press contracts its dimensions, and 
retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless 
margin. Modern authorship is become a spe- 
cies of stenography : we contrive even to read 
by proxy. We skim the cream of prose with- 
out any trouble ; we get at the quintessence of 
poetry without loss of time. The staple com- 
modity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy 
bullion of books, is driven out of the market of 
learning, and the intercourse of the literary 
world is carried on, and the credit of the great 
capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating 
medium of magazines and reviews. Those who 
are chiefly concerned in catering for the taste 
of others, and serving up critical opinions in a 
compendious, elegant, and portable form, are 
not forgetful of themselves : they are not scrupu- 



246 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC* 

loiisly solicitous, idly inquisitive, about the real 
merits, the hona Jide contents of the works they 
are deputed to appraise and value, any more 
than the reading public who employ them. 
They look no farther for the contents of the 
work than the title-page, and pronounce a 
peremptory decision on its merits or defects by 
a glance at the name and party of the writer. 
This state of polite letters seems to admit of 
improvement in only one respect, which is to 
go a step farther, and write for the amusement 
and edification of the world, accounts of works 
that were never either written or read at all, 
and to cry up or abuse the authors by name, 
though they have no existence but in the critic's, 
invention. This would save a great deal of 
labour in vain ; anonymous critics might 
pounce upon the defenceless heads of fictitious 
candidates for fame and bread 5 reviews, from 
being novels founded upon facts, would aspire 
to be pure romances ; and we should arrive at 
the heau ideal of a commonwealth of letters, 
at the euthanasia of thought, and millennium 
of criticism ! 

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arca- 
dia' was written, those middle-men, the critics, 
were not known. The author and reader came 
into immediate contact, and seemed never tired 
of each other's company. We are more fasti- 
dious and dissipated : the efleminacy of modern 
t^ste would, I am afraid, shrink back affrighted 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 247 

at the formidable sight of this once popular 
work, which is about as long (Jiorresco ref evens /) 
as all Walter Scott's novels put together; but 
besides its size and appearance, it has, I think, 
other defects of a more intrinsic and insupera- 
ble nature. It is to me one of the greatest 
monuments of the abuse of intellectual power 
upon record. It puts one in mind of the 
court dresses and preposterous fashions of the 
time, which are grown obsolete and disgusting. 
It is not romantic, but scholastic ; not poetry, 
but casuistry; not nature, but art, and the 
worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better 
than nature. Of the number of fine things 
that are constantly passing through the author's 
mind, there is hardly one that he has not con- 
trived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and 
maliciously, in order to aggrandize our idea of 
himself. Out of five hundred folio pages, 
there are hardly, I conceive, half a dozen 
sentences expressed simply and directly, with 
the sincere desire to convey the image implied, 
and without a systematic interpolation of the 
wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlast- 
ing impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise 
the object, instead of displaying it in its true 
colours and real proportions. Every page is 
with '* centric and eccentric scribbled o'er ;" 
his muse is tattooed and tricked out like an 
Indian goddess. He writes a court-hand, with 
flourishes like a schoolmaster ; his figures are 



248 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

wrought in chain-stitch. All his thoughts are 
forced and painful births, and may be said to 
be delivered by the Csesarean operation. At 
last, they become distorted and rickety in 
themselves ; and before they have been cramped 
and twisted and swaddled into lifelessness and 
deformity. Imagine a writer to have great 
natural talents, great powers of memory and 
invention, an eye for nature, a knowledge of 
the passions, much learning, and equal indus- 
try ; but that he is so full of a consciousness of 
all this, and so determined to make the reader 
conscious of it at every step, that he becomes 
a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so ; 
— ^that he never lets a casual observation pass 
without perplexing it with an endless, running 
commentary, that he never states a feeling 
without so many circumambages, without so 
many interlineations and parenthetical remarks 
on all that can be said for it, and anticipations 
of all that can be said against it, and that he 
never mentions a fact without giving so many 
circumstances, and conjuring up so many things 
that it is like or not like, that you lose the 
main clue of the story in its infinite ramifica- 
tions and intersections ; and we may form some 
faint idea of ^ The Countess of Pembroke's 
Arcadia,* which is spun with great labour out 
of the author's brains, and hangs like a huge 
cobweb over the face of nature ! This is not, 
as far as I can judge, an exaggerated descrip- 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 249 

tion ; but as near the truth as I can make it. 
The proofs are not far to seek. Take the first 
sentence, or open the volume anywhere and 
read. I will, however, take one of the most 
beautiful passages, near the beginning, to show 
how the subject matter^ of which the noblest 
use might have been made, is disfigured by the 
affectation of the style, and the importunate 
and vain activity of the waiter's mind. The 
passage I allude to is the celebrated description 
of Arcadia. 

*' So that the third day after, in the time that the 
' morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly 
floor against the coming of the sun, the nightingales 
(striving one with the other which could in most dainty 
variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow) made them 
put oflf their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which 
that night had been their pa\ilion) they went on their 
journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus' eyes 
(wearied with the wasted soil of Laconia) with welcome 
prospects. There were hills which garnished their proad 
heights with stately trees : humble valleys whose base 
estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver 
rivers ; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing 
flowers ; thickets, which being lined with most pleasant 
shade were witnessed so to, by the cheerful disposition of 
many well-tuned birds ; each pasture stored with sheep 
feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs, with 
bleating oratory craved the dam's comfort ; here a shep- 
herd's boy piping, as though he should never be old : there 
a young shepherdess knittmg, and withal singing, and it 
seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her 
hands kept time to her voice-music. As for the houses 
of the country (for many houses came under their eye) 



230 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

they were scattered, no two being one by the other, and 
yet not so far off, as that it barred mutual succour ; a 
show, as it were, of an accompaniable solitariness, and of 
a civil wildness. I pray you, said Musidorus (then first 
unsealing his long-silent lips), what countries be these 
we pass through, w^hich are so divers in show, the one 
wanting no store, the other having no store but of want ? 
The country, answered Claius, where you were cast 
ashore, and now are passed through, is Laconia ; but this 
country (where you now set your foot) is Arcadia." 

One would think the very name might have 
lulled his senses to delightful repose in some 
still, lonely valley, and have laid the restless 
spirit of Gothic quaintness, witticism, and con- 
ceit in the lap of classic elegance and pastoral 
simplicity. Here are images, too, of touching 
beauty and everlasting truth that needed nothing 
but to be simply and nakedly expressed to have 
made a picture equal (nay superior) to the 
allegorical representation of ' The Four Sea- 
sons of Life,' by Giorgione. But no ! He 
cannot let his imagination, or that of the 
reader, dwell for a moment on the beaaty or 
power of the real object. He thinks nothing 
is done, unless it is his doing. He must offi- 
ciously and gratuitously interpose between you 
and the subject, as the Cicerone of Nature, dis- 
tracting the eye and the mind by continual 
uncalled-for interruptions, analyzing, dissect- 
ing, disjointing, murdering everything, and 
reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture 
over the dead body of nature. The moving* 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 251 

spring of his mind is not sensibility or imagin- 
ation, but dry, literal, unceasing craving after 
intellectual excitement, which is indifferent to 
pleasure or pain, to beauty or deformity, and 
likes to owe everything to its own perverse 
efforts, rather than the sense of power in other 
things. It constantly interferes to perplex and 
neutralise. It never leaves the mind in a wise 
passiveness. In the infancy of taste, the fro- 
ward pupils of art took nature to pieces, as 
spoiled children do a watch, to see what was in 
it. After taking it to pieces they could not, 
with all their cunning, put it together again, so 
as to restore circulation to the heart, or its living 
hue to the face i The quaint and pedantic style 
here objected to was not, however, the natural 
growth of untutored fancy, but an artificial ex- 
crescence transferred from logic and rhetoric to 
poetry. It was not owing to the excess of 
imagination, but of the want of it, that is, to 
the predominance of the mere understanding or 
dialectic faculty over the imaginative and the 
sensitive. It is, in fact, poetry degenerating at 
every step into prose, sentiment entangling 
itself into a controversy, from the habitual 
leaven of polemics and casuistry in the writer's 
mind. The poet insists upon matters of fact 
from the beauty or grandeur that accompanies 
them ; our prose-poet insists upon them because 
they are matters of fact, and buries the beauty 
and grandeur in a heap of common rubbish, 



252 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

*'like two grains of wheat in a bushel of chaff/' 
The true poet illustrates for ornament or use: 
the fantastic pretender only because he is not 
easy till he can translate everything out of itself 
into something else. Imagination consists in 
enriching one idea by another, which has the 
same feeling or set of associations belonging to 
it in a higher or more striking degree ; the 
quaint or scholastic style consists in comparing 
one thing to another by the mere process of 
abstraction, and the more forced and naked the 
comparison, the less of harmony or congruity 
there is in it, the more wire-drawn and ambi. 
guous the link of generalisation by which ob- 
jects are brought together, the greater is the 
triumph of the false and fanciful style. There 
was a marked instance of the difference in some 
lines from Ben Jonson, which I have above 
quoted, and which, as they are alternate exam- 
ples of the extremes of both in the same author, 
and in the same short poem, there can be no- 
thing invidious in giving. In conveying an 
idea of female softness and sweetness, he asks — 

" Have you felt the wool of the beaver. 
Or swan*s down ever ? 
Or smelt of the bud of the briar, 
Or the nard in the fire ? " 

Now 'Hhe swan's down 'Ms a striking and 
beautiful image of the most delicate and yield- 
ing softness ; but we have no associations of a 
pleasing sort with the wool of the beaver. The 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 253 

comparison is dry, hard, and barren of effect. 
It may establish the matter of fact, but detracts 
from and impairs the sentiment. The smell of 
** the bud of the briar'' is a double-distilled es- 
sence of sweetness : besides, there are all the 
other concomitant ideas of youth, beauty, and 
blushing modesty, which blend with and 
heighten the immediate feeling : but the poetical 
reader was not bound to know even what nard 
is (it is merely a learned substance, a nonentity 
to the imagination), nor whether it has a fra- 
grant or disagreeable scent when thrown into 
the fire, till Ben Jonson went out of his way to 
give him this pedantic piece of information. It 
is a mere matter of fact or of experiment ; and 
while the experiment is making in reality or 
fancy, the sentiment stands still ; or even tak- 
ing it for granted in the literal and scientific 
sense, we are where we were ; it does not en- 
hance the passion to be expressed : we have no 
love for the smell of nard in the fire, but we have 
an old, a long cherished one from infancy, 
for the bud of the briar. Sentiment, as Mr 
Burke said of nobility, is a thing of inveterate 
prejudice ; and cannot be created, as some 
people (learned and unlearned) are inclined to 
suppose, out of fancy or out of anything by the 
wit of man. The artificial and natural style do 
not alternate in this way in the ^Arcadia:' the 
one is but the Helot, the eyeless drudge of the 
other. Thus evea in the above passage, which 



254 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

is comparatively beautiful and simple in its 
general structure, we have '^ the bleating ora- 
tory " of lambs, as if anything could be more 
unlike oratory than the bleating of lambs. We 
have a young shepherdess knitting, whose 
hands keep time not to her voice, but to her 
'' voice-music," which introduces a foreign and 
questionable distinction, merely to perplex the 
subject ; we have meadows enamelled with all 
sorts of '^eye-pleasing flowers," as if it were 
necessary to inform the reader that flowers 
pleased the eye, or as if they did not please 
any other sense: we have valleys refreshed 
*' with silver streams," an epithet that has 
nothing to do with the refreshment here spoken 
of: w^e have ''an accompaniable solitariness 
and a civil wildness," which are a pair of very 
laboured antitheses ; in fine, we have '' want of 
store, and store of want." 

Again, the passage describing the shipwreck 
of Pyrochles, has been much and deservedly 
admired : yet it is not free from the same inhe- 
rent faults. 

*' But a little way off they saw the mast (of the vessel) 
whose proud height now lay along, like a widow having 
lost her mate, of whom she held her honour ; " [This 
needed explanation] " but upon the mast they saw a young 
man (at least if it were a man) bearing show of about 
eighteen years of age, who sat (as on horseback) having 
nothing upon him but his shirt, which being wrought with 
blue silk and gold, had a kind of resemblance to the sea," 
[This is a sort of alliteration in natural history].'' on which 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 255 

the sun (then near his western home) did shoot some of 
his beams. His hair (which the young men of Greece 
used to wear very long) was stirred up and down with 
the wind, which seemed to have a sport to play with it, as 
the sea had to kiss his feet ; himself full of admirable 
beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of his seat and 
gesture ; for, holding his head up full of unmoved ma- 
jesty, he held a sword aloft with his fair arm, which often 
he waved about his crown, as though he would threaten 
the world in that extremity." 

If the original sin of alliteration, antithesis, 
and metaphysical conceit could be weeded out 
of this passage, there is hardly a more heroic 
one to be found in prose or poetry. 

Here is one more passage marred in the mak- 
ing. A shepherd is supposed to say of his mis- 
tress, 

" Certainly, as her eyelids are more pleasant to behold 
than two white kids climbing up a fair tree and browsing 
on its tenderest branches, and yet are nothing compared 
to the day- shining stars contained in them ; and as her 
breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, 
which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed 
waters in the extreme heat of summer ; and yet is nothing 
compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth 
carry ; no more all that our eyes can see of her (though 
when they have seen her, what else they shall ever see 
is but dry stubble after clover grass), is to be matched 
with the flock of unspeakable virtues, laid up delightfully 
in that best buildedfold." 

Now here are images of singular beauty and 
of Eastern originality and daring, followed up 
with enigmatical or unmeaning common-places, 
because he never knows when to leave off, and 



256 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

thinks he can never be too wise or too dull for 
his reader. He loads his prose Pegasus like a 
pack-horse, with all that comes, and with a 
number of little trifling circumstances, that fall 
off, and you are obliged to stop to pick them up 
by the way. He cannot give his imagination a 
moment's pause, thinks nothing done while any 
thing remains to do, and exhausts nearly all that 
can be said upon a subject, whether good, bad, 
or indifferent. The above passages are taken 
from the beginning of the ' Arcadia,' when the 
author's style was hardly yet formed. The fol- 
lowing is a less favourable, but fairer specimen 
of the work. It is the model of a love-letter, 
and is only longer than that of Adriano de 
Armada, in * Love's Labour's Lost.' 

** Most blessed paper, which shall kiss that hand, whereto 
all blessedness is in nature a servant, do not yet disdain 
to carry with thee the woful words of a miser now des- 
pairing : neither be afraid to appear before her, bearing 
the base title of the sender. For no sooner shall that 
divine hand touch thee, but that thy baseness shall be 
turned to most high preferment. Therefore mourn boldly 
my ink : for while she looks upon you your blackness will 
shine : cry out boldly my lamentation, for while she reads 
you your cries will be music. Say then ( O happy mes- 
senger of a most unhappy message) that the too soor born 
and too late dying creature, which dares not speak, no, not 
look, no, not scarcely think (as from his miserable self unto 
her heavenly highness), only presumes to desire thee (in 
the time that her eyes and voice do exalt thee) to say, and 
in this manner to say, not from him, oh no, that were not 
lit, but of him, thus much unto her sacred judgment. O 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 257 

you, the only honour to women, to men the admiration, 
you that being armed by love, defy him that armed you 
in this high estate wherein you have placed me" [i. e. the 
letter] *' yet let me remember him to whom I am bound 
for bringing me to your presence : and let me remember 
him, who (since he is yours, how mean soever he be) it is 
reason you have an account of him. The wretch (yet 
your wretch) though with languishing steps runs fast to 
his grave; and will you suffer a temple (how poorly built 
soever, but yet a temple of your deity) to be rased ? But 
he dieth : it is most true, he dieth ; and he in whom you 
live, to obey you, dieth. Whereof though he plain, he 
doth not complain : for it is a harm, but no wrong, which 
he hath received. He dies, because in woeful language all 
his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure : for if you 
will not that he live, alas, alas, what foUoweth, what fol- 
loweth of the most ruined Dorus, but his end ? End, then, 
evil destined Dorus, end ; and end, thou woeful letter, 
end : for it sufficeth her wisdom to know, that her hea- 
venly will shall be accomplished." — ^Lib. ii. p. 117. 

This style relishes neither of the lover nor the 
poet. Nine-tenths of the work are written in 
this manner. It is in the very manner of those 
books of gallantry and chivalry, which, with 
the labyrinths of their style, and ^^the reason of 
their unreasonableness/' turned the fine intellects 
of the Knight of La Mancha. In a word (and 
not to speak it profanely), the Arcadia is a 
riddle, a rebus, an acrostic in folio : it contains 
about 4,000 far-fetched similes, and 6,000 im- 
practicable dilemmas; about 10,000 reasons for 
doing nothing at all, and as many more against 
it ; numberless alliterations, puns, questions and 
commands, and other figures of rhetoric; about 



258 ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 

a score good passages that one may turn to with 
pleasure, and the most involved, irksome, im- 
progressive, and heteroclite subject that ever 
was chosen to exercise the pen or patience of 
man. It no longer adorns the toilette or lies 
upon the pillow of Maids of Honour and Peer- 
esses in their own right (the Pamelas and Phi- 
locleas of a later age), but remains upon the 
shelves of the libraries of the curious in long 
works and great names, a monument to shew 
that the author was one of the ablest men and 
worst writers of the age of Elizabeth. 

His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, 
far-fetched and frigid. I shall select only one 
that has been much commended. It is ^ To the 
Highway, where his Mistress had passed,' a 
strange subject, but not unsuitable to the» au- 
thor's genius. 

" Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be, 
And that my Muse (to some ears not unsweet) 
Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet 
More oft than to a chamber melody ; 
Now blessed you bear onward blessed me 
To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet ; 
My Muse, and I must you of duty greet 
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 
Be you still fair, honoured by public heed. 
By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot : 
Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed ; 
And that you know, I envy you no lot 
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss. 
Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss." 

The answer of the Highway has not been pre- 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 259 

served, but the sincerity of this appeal must no 
doubt have moved the stocks and stones to rise 
and sympathise. His ' Defence of Poesy ' is 
his most readable performance ; there he is quite 
at home, in a sort of special pleader's office, 
where his ingenuity, scholastic subtlety, and 
tenaciousness in argument stand him in good 
stead ; and he brings off poetry with flying co- 
lours ; for he was a man of wit, of sense, and 
learning, though not a poet of true taste or un- 
jgophisticated genius. 



LECTURE VII. 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACON S WORKS COM^ 

PARED AS TO STYLE WITH SIR THOMAS BROWN 
AND JEREMY TAYLOR. 

Lord Bacon has been called (and justly) one 
of the wisest of mankind. The word wisdom 
characterises him more than any other. It was 
not that he did so much himself to advance the 
knowledge of man or nature, as that he saw 
what others had done to advance it, and what 
was still wanting to its full accomplishment. 
He stood upon the high Vantage ground of ge- 
nius and learning ; and traced, *' as in a map 
the voyager his course," the long devious march 
of human intellect, its elevations and depres- 
sions, its windings and its errors. He had a 
* Marge discourse of reason, looking before and 
after.** He had made an exact and extensive 
survey of human acquirements : he took the 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 261 

gauge and metre, the depths and soundings of 
human capacity. He was master of the com- 
parative anatomy of the mind of man, of the 
balance of power among the different faculties. 
He had thoroughly investigated and carefully 
registered the steps and processes of his own 
thoughts, with their irregularities and failures, 
their liabilities to wrong conclusions, either from 
the difficulties of the subject, or from moral 
causes, from prejudice, indolence, vanity, from 
conscious strength or weakness ; and he applied 
this self-knowledge on a mighty scale to the 
general advances or retrograde movements of 
the aggregate intellect of the world. He knew 
well what the goal and crown of moral and in- 
tellectual power was, how far men had fallen 
short of it, and how they came to miss it. He 
had an instantaneous perception of the quantity 
of truth or good in any given system; and of the 
analogy of any given result or principle to others 
of the same kind scattered through nature or his- 
tory. His observations take in a larger range, 
have more profundity from the fineness of his 
tact, and more comprehension from the extent 
of his knowledge, along the line of which his 
imagination ran with equal celerity and cer- 
tainty, than any other person's whose writings 
I know. He however seized upon these results, 
rather by intuition than by inference ; he knew 
them in their mixed modes and combined effects, 
rather than by abstraction or analysis, as he ex- 



262 CHARACTER OF LORD ^ACON^S WORKS. 

plains them to others, not by resolving them into 
their component parts and elementary principles, 
so much as by illustrations drawn from other 
things operating in like manner, and produc- 
ing similar results ; or, as he himself has finely 
expressed it, ^'by the same footsteps of nature 
treading or printing upon several subjects or 
matters." He had great sagacity of observation, 
solidity of judgment and scope of fancy; in this 
resembling Plato and Burke, that he was a 
popular philosopher and philosophical declaimer. 
His writings have the gravity of prose with the 
fervour and vividness of poetry. His sayings 
have the effect of axioms, and are at once striking 
and self-evident. He views objects from the great- 
est height, and his reflections acquire a sublimity 
in proportion to their profundity, as in deep 
wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest 
fixed stars. The chain of thought reaches to the 
centre, and ascends the brightest heaven of in- 
vention. Reason in him works like an instinct ; 
and his slightest suggestions carry the force of 
conviction. His opinions are judicial. His in- 
duction of particulars is alike wonderful for 
learning and vivacity, for curiosity and dignity, 
and an all-pervading intellect binds the whole 
together in a graceful and pleasing form. His 
style is equally sharp and sweet, flowing and 
pithy, condensed and expansive, expressing vo- 
lumes in a sentence, or amplifying a single 
thought into pages of rich, glowing, and de- 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 263 

lightful eloquence. He had great liberality froir 
seeing the various aspects of things (there was 
nothing bigotted, or intolerant, or exclusive 
about him), and yet he had firmness and deci- 
sion from feeling their weight and consequences. 
His character was then an amazing insight into 
the limits of human knowledge and acquaintance 
with the landmarks of human intellect, so as to 
trace its past history or point out the path to 
future inquirers, but when he quits the ground 
of contemplation of what others have done or 
left undone to project himself into future disco- 
veries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead 
of original. His strength was in reflection, not 
in production ; he was the surveyor, not the 
builder of the fabric of science. He had not 
strictly the constructive faculty. He was the 
principal pioneer in the march of modern phi- 
losophy, and has completed the education and 
discipline of the mind for the acquisition of 
truth, by explaining all the impediments or fur- 
therances that can be applied to it or cleared 
out of its way. In a word, he was one of the 
greatest men this country has to boast, and his 
name deserves to stand, where it is generally 
placed, by the side of those of our greatest 
writers, whether we consider the variety, the 
strength, or the splendour of his faculties, for 
ornament or use. 

His ' Advancement of Learning' is his great- 
est work ; and next to that I like the ' Essays ;' 



264 CHARACTER OF LORD BAGOn's WORKS* 

for the ' Novum Organum' is more laboured 
and less effectual than it might be. I shall 
give a few instances from the first of these 
chiefly, to explain the scope of the above re- 
marks. 

' The Advancement of Learning' is dedicated 
to James I., and he there observes, with a mix- 
ture of truth and flattery, which looks very 
much like a bold irony— 

" I am well assured that this which I shall say is no 
amplification at ail^ but a positive and measured truth : 
which is, that there hath not been, since Christ's time, any 
king or temporal monarch which hath been so learned in 
all literature and erudition, divine and human (as your 
majesty). For let a man seriously and diligently revolve 
and peruse the succession of the Emperors of Rome, of 
which Csesar the Dictator, who lived some years before 
Christ, and Marcus Antoninus were the best-learned ; and 
so descend to the Emperors of Grecia, or of the West, 
and then to the lines of France, Spain, England, Scotland, 
and the rest, and ha shall find this judgment is truly made. 
For it seemeth much in a king, if by the compendious ex- 
tractions of other men^s wits and labour, he can take hold 
of any superficial ornaments and shows of learning, or if he 
countenance and prefer learning and learned men j but to 
drink indeed of the true fountain of learning, nay, to have 
such a fountain of learning in himself, in a king, and in a 
king born, is almost a miracle." 

To any one less wrapped up in self-sufficiency 
than James, the rule would have been more 
staggering than the exception could have been 
gratifying. But Bacon was a sort of prose- 
laureate to the reigning prince, and his loyalty 
had never been suspected. 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 265 

In recommending learned men as fit counsel- 
lors in a state, he thus points out the deficiencies 
of the mere empiric or man of business, in not 
being provided against uncommon emergencies. 
—" Neither," he says, '^ can the experience of 
one man's life furnish examples and precedents for 
the events of another man's life. For, as it hap- 
peneth sometimes, that the grand-child, or other 
descendant, resembleth the ancestor more than 
the son ; so many times occurrences of present 
times may sort better with ancient examples, 
than with those of the latter or immediate times ; 
and lastly, the wit of one man can no more coun- 
tervail learning, than one man's means can hold 
way with a common purse."— This is finely put. 
It might be added, on the other hand, by way of 
caution, that neither can the wit or opinion of 
one learned man set itself up, as it sometimes 
does, in opposition to the common sense or ex- 
perience of mankind. 

When he goes on to vindicate the superiority 
of the scholar over the mere politician in dis- 
interestedness and inflexibility of principle, by 
arguing ingeniously enough — '' The corrupter 
sort of mere politiques, that have not their 
thoughts established by learning in the love and 
apprehension of duty, nor never look abroad 
into universality, do refer all things to themselves 
and thrust themselves into the centre of the 
world, as if all times should meet in them and 
their fortunes, never caring, in all tempests what 



266 CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 

becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save 
themselves in the cock-boat of their own fortune; 
whereas men that feel the weight of duty, and 
know the limits of self-love, use to make good 
their places and duties, though with peril.'* — 
I can only wish that the practice were as con- 
stant as the theory is plausible, or that the time 
gave evidence of as much stability and sincerity 
of principle in well-educated minds as it does of 
versatility and gross egotism in self-taught men. 
I need not give the instances, ^' they will receive" 
(in our author's phrase) " an open allowance :" 
but I am afraid that neither habits of abstraction 
nor the want of them will entirely exempt men 
from a bias to their own interest ; that it is nei- 
ther learning nor ignorance that thrusts us into 
the centre of our own little world, but that it is 
nature that has put man there 1 

His character of the school-men is perhaps the 
finest philosophical sketch that was ever drawn. 
After observing that there are ^^two marks and 
badges of suspected and falsified science ; the 
one, the novelty and strangeness of terms, the 
other the strictness of positions, which of neces- 
sity doth induce oppositions, and so questions 
and altercations" — he proceeds — '^ Surely like 
as many substances in nature which are solid, do 
putrefy and corrupt into worms; so it is the pro- 
perty of good and sound knowledge to putrefy 
and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, un- 
wholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiai-' 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 267 

late questions ; which have, indeed, a kind of 
quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of 
matter or goodness of quality. This kind of de- 
generate learning did chiefly reign amongst the 
school-men, who, having sharp and strong wits, 
and abundance of leisure, and small variety 
of reading, ; but their wits being shut up in the 
cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their 
dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells 
ofmonasteries and colleges, and knowing little 
history, either of nature or time, did out of no 
great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation 
of wit^ spin out unto us those laborious webs of 
learning which are extant in their books. For 
the wit and mind of man, if it work upon mat- 
ter, which is the contemplation of the creatures 
of God, worketh according to the stuff*, and 
is limited thereby ; but if it work upon itself, as 
the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, 
and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, 
admirable for the fineness of thread and w^ork, 
but of no substance or profit.'^ 

And a little further on, he adds — '^ Notwith- 
standing, certain it is, that if those school-men, 
to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel 
of wit, had joined variety and universality of 
reading and contemplation, they had proved ex- 
cellent lights to the great advancement of all 
learning and knowledge ; but, as they are, they 
are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with 
dark keeping. But, as in the inquiry of the 



268 CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 

divine truth, tlieir pride inclined to leave the 
oracle of God's word, and to varnish in the 
mixture of their own inventions ; so in the in- 
quisition of nature, they ever left the oracle of 
God's works, and adored the deceiving and de- 
formed images which the unequal mirror of 
their own minds, or a few received authors or 
principles did represent unto them/' 

One of his acutest (I might have said pro- 
foundest) remarks relates to the near connection 
between deceiving and being deceived. Volumes 
might be written in explanation of it. ^'This 
vice, therefore," he says, ^'brancheth itself into 
two sorts ; delight in deceiving, an aptness to 
be deceived, imposture and credulity; which, 
although they appear to be of a diverse nature, 
the one seeming to proceed of cunning, and the 
other of simplicity, yet certainly they do for the 
most part concur. For, as the verse noteth, 
Percontatoremfugito, nara garrulus idem est; an 
inquisitive man is a prattler : so upon the like 
reason, a credulous man is a deceiver; as we see 
it in fame, that he that will easily believe rumours 
will as easily augment rumours, and add some- 
what to them of his own, which Tacitus wisely 
noteth, when he saith, Fingunt simul creduntque, 
so great an affinity hath fiction and belief." 

T proceed to his account of the causes of error, 
and directions for the conduct of the understand- 
ing, which are admirable both for their specu- 
lative ingenuity and practical use. 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 269 

" The first of these," says Lord Bacon, '' is the extreme 
affection of two anxieties : the one antiquity, the other 
novelty, wherein it seemeth the children of time do take 
after the nature and malice of the father. For as he de- 
voureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour 
and suppress the other ; while antiquity envieth there 
should be new additions, and novelty cannot be content to 
add, but it must deface. Surely, the advice of the pro- 
phet is the true direction in this respect. State super vias 
antiquas, et videte qucenam sit via recta et bona, et ambulate 
in ed. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men 
should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the 
best way, but when the discovery is well taken, then to 
take progression. And to speak truly," he adds, *' Anti- 
quitas seculi juventus mundi. These times are the ancient 
times when the world is ancient ; and not those which we 
count ancient ordine retrogradoy by a computation back- 
wards from ourselves. 

" Another error, induced by the former, is a distrust that 
anything should be now to be found out which the world 
should have missed and passed over so long time, as if 
the same objection were to be made to time that Lucian 
makes to Jupiter and other the Heathen Gods, of which 
he wondereth that they begot so many children in old 
age, and begot none in his time, and asketh whether they 
were become septuagenary, or whether the law^ Papia 
made against old men's marriages had restrained them. 
So it seemeth men doubt, lest time was become past 
children and generation; wherein, contrary- wise, we see 
commonly the levity and unconstancy of men's judgments, 
which, till a matter be done, wonder that it can be done, 
and as soon as it is done wonder again that it was done no 
sooner, as we see in the expedition of Alexander into Asia, 
which at first was prejudged as a vast and impossible 
enterprise, and yet afterwards it pleaseth Livy to make 
no more of it than this, nil aliud quam bene ausus vana 
contemncre. And the same happened to Columbus in hi» 



270 CHARACTER OF LORD BACON S WORKS. 

western navigation. But in intellectual matters it is 
much more common ; as may be seen in most of the pro- 
positions in Euclid, which till they be demonstrate, they 
seem strange to our assent, but being demonstrate, our 
mind accepteth of them by a kind of relation (as the 
lawyers speak), as if we had known them before. 

" Another is an impatience of doubt and haste to asser- 
tion without due and mature suspension of judgment. 
For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the 
two ways of action, commonly spoken of by the ancients. 
The one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the 
end impassable ; the other rough and troublesome in the 
entrance, but, after a while, fair and even ; so it is in 
contemplation, if a man will begin with certainties, he 
shall end in doubts ; but if he will be content to begin 
with doubts, he shall end in certainties. 

'* Another error is in the manner of the tradition or 
delivery of knowledge, which is for the most part magis- 
tral and peremptory, and not ingenuous and faithful ; in a 
sort, as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined. 
It is true, that in compendious treatises for practice, that 
form is not to be disallowed. But in the true handling of 
knowledge, men ought not to fall either on the one side 
into the vein of Velleius the Epicurean : nil tarn metuens 
quant ne duhitare aliqua de re videretur ; nor, on the other 
side, into Socrates his ironical doubting of all things, but 
to propound things sincerely, w^ith more or less assevera- 
tion ; as they stand in a man's own judgment, proved more 
or less." 

Lord Bacon in this part declares, "that it is 
not his purpose to enter into a laudative of 
learning or to make a hymn to the Muses/' yet 
he has gone near to do this in the following ob- 
servations on the dignity of knowledge. He 
says, after speaking of rulers and conquerors :-— 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 271 

" But the commandment of knowledge is yet higher 
than the commandment over the will ; for it is a com- 
mandment over the reason, belief, and understanding of 
man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth 
law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth 
which setteth a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and 
souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, 
opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning. And 
therefore we see the detestable and extreme pleasure 
that arch-heretics and false prophets and impostors are 
transported with, when they once find in themselves that 
they have a superiority in the faith and conscience of 
men ; so great, as if they have once tasted of it, it is 
seldom seen that any torture or persecution can make 
them relinquish or abandon it. But as this is that which 
the author of the Revelations calls the depth or profound- 
ness of Satan ; so by argument of contraries, the just 
and lawful sovereignty over men's understanding, by force 
of truth rightly interpreted, is that which approacheth 

nearest to the similitude of the Divine rule Let 

us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge 
and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most 
aspire, which is immortality or continuance : for to this 
tendeth generation, and raising of houses and families ; 
to this tendeth buildings, foundations, and monuments ; 
to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebra- 
tion, and in effect the strength of all other humane de- 
sires ; we see then how far the monuments of w^it and 
learning are more durable than the monuments of power 
or of the hands. For, have not the verses of Homer con- 
tinued twenty-five hundred years and more, without the 
loss of a syllable or letter ; during which time infinite 
palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and 
demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures 
or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, no, nor of the 
kings or great personages of much later years. For the 
originals cannot last ; and the copies cannot but lose of 



272 CHAHACTER OF LORD BACOn's WORKS. 

the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and 
knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of 
time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are 
they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, 
and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and 
causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. 
So that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, 
which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, 
and consociateth the most remote regions in participation 
of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, 
which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and 
make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illumi- 
nations, and inventions the one of the other?" 

Passages of equal force and beauty might be 
quoted from almost every page of this work and 
of the Essays. 

Sir Thomas Brown; and Bishop Taylor were 
two prose writers in the succeeding age, who, 
for pomp and copiousness of style, might be 
compared to Lord Bacon. In all other respects 
they were opposed to him and to one another. — 
As Bacon seemed to bend all his thoughts to 
the practice of life, and to bring home the light 
of science to ^Uhe bosoms and businesses of 
men," Sir Thomas Browne! seemed to be of 
opinion that the only business of life was to 
think, and that the proper object of speculation 
was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more 
speculation, and '' find no end in wandering 
mazes lost." He chose the incomprehensible 
and impracticable as almost the only subjects 
fit for a lofty and lasting contemplation, or for 
the exercise of a solid faith. He cried out for 



CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN. 273 

an oh altitude beyond the heights of revelation, 
and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries, 
as the pastime of his leisure hours. He pushes 
a question to the utmost verge of conjecture, 
that he may repose on the certainty of doubt ; 
and he removes an object to the greatest dis*- 
tance from him, that he may take a high and 
abstracted interest in it, consider it in its rela- 
tion to the sum of things, not to himself, and 
bewilder his understanding in the universality 
of its nature, and the inscrutableness of its 
origin. His is the sublime of indifference; a 
passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He 
turns the world round for his amusement, as if 
it was a globe of paste-board. He looks down 
on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his sta- 
tion in one of the planets. The Antipodes are 
next-door neighbours to him, and Doomsday is 
not far off. With a thought he embraces 
both the poles ; the march of his pen is over 
the great divisions of geography and chro- 
nology. Nothing touches him nearer than 
humanity. He feels that he is mortal only 
in the decay of nature, and the dust of 
long-forgotten tombs. The finite is lost in 
the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies 
or the history of empires are to him but a 
point in time or a speck in the universe. 
The great Platonic year revolves in one of 
his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp 
of his style. He scoops an antithesis out 
of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up an epithet 



274 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

from the sweepings of Chaos* It is as if his 
books had dropt from the clouds, or as if Friar 
Bacon's head could speak. He stands on the 
edge of the world of sense and reason, and 
gains a vertigo by looking down on impossi- 
bilities and chimeras. Or he busies himself 
with the mysteries of the Cabala, or the en- 
closed secrets of the heavenly quincunxes, as 
children are amused with tales of the nursery. 
The passion of curiosity (the only passion of 
childhood) had in him survived to old age, and 
had superannuated his other faculties. He mo- 
ralises and grows pathetic on a mere idle fancy 
of his own, as if thought and being were the 
same, or as if '^ all this world were one glorious 
lie.'' For a thing to have ever had a name is 
sufficient warrant to entitle it to respectful belief, 
and to invest it with all the rights of a subject 
and its predicates. He is superstitious, but not 
bigoted J to him all religions are much the 
same, and he says that he should not like to 
have lived in the time of Christ and the Apos- 
tles, as it would have rendered his faith too 
gross and palpable. — His gossiping egotism 
and personal character have been preferred un- 
justly to Montaigne's. He had no personal 
character at all but the peculiarity of resolving 
all the other elements of his being into thought, 
and of trying experiments on his own nature in 
an exhausted receiver of idle and unsatisfactory 
speculations. All that he ^' differences himself 
by," to use his own expression, is this moral 



AS A WRITER. 275 

and physical indifference. In describing him- 
self he deals only in negatives. He says he 
has neither prejudices nor antipathies to man- 
ners, habits, climate, food, to persons or things ; 
they were alike acceptable to him as they af- 
forded new topics for reflection; and he even 
professes that he could never bring himself 
heartily to hate the devil. He owns in one 
place of the JReligio Medici, that '' he could be 
content if the species were continued like trees," 
and yet he declares that this was from no aver- 
sion to love, or beauty, or harmony; and the 
reasons he assigns to prove the orthodoxy of 
his taste in this respect is, that he was an ad- 
mirer of the music of the spheres ! He tells us 
that he often composed a comedy in his sleep. 
It would be curious to know the subject or the 
texture of the plot. It must have been some- 
thing like Nabbes's ' Mask of Microcosmus/ of 
which the dramatis personm have been already 
given ; or else a misnomer, like Dante's ' Divine 
Comedy of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory*' He 
was twice married, as if to show his disregard 
even for his own theory ; and he had a hand in 
the execution of some old women for witchcraft, 
I suppose to keep a decorum in absurdity, and 
to indulge an agreeable horror at his own fan- 
tastical reveries on the occasion. In a word, 
his mind seemed to converse chiefly with the 
intelligible forms, the spectral apparitions of 
things ; he delighted in the preternatural and 



276 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

visionary, and lie only existed at the circum- 
ference of his nature. He had the most intense 
consciousness of contradictions and non-entities, 
and he decks them out in the pride and pe- 
dantry of words, as if they were the attire of his 
proper person : the categories hang about his 
neck like the gold chain of knighthood, and he 
'' walks gowned^' in the intricate folds and 
swelling drapery of dark sayings and impene- 
trable riddles ! 

I will give one gorgeous passage to illustrate 
all this, from his ' Urn-Burial, or Hydriotaphia.' 
He digs up the urns of some ancient Druids 
with the same ceremony and devotion as if they 
had contained the hallowed relics of his dearest 
friends ; and certainly we feel (as it has been 
said) the freshness of the mould, and the breath 
of mortality, in the spirit and force of his style. 
The conclusion of this singular and unparalleled 
performance is as follows : 

" What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles 
assumed when he hid himself among women, though 
puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What 
time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous 
nations of the dead, and slept with princes and coun- 
sellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the 
proprietors of these bones, or what bodies these ashes 
made up, were a question above antiquarianism : not to 
be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except 
we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary obser- 
vators. Had they made as good provision for their names, 
as they have done for their reliques, they had not so 
grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist 



AS A WRITER. 277 

in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in 
duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, 
persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a 
fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, 
as emblems of mortal vanities; antidotes against pride* 
vain glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories, which 
thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement 
for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality 
of their names, were never dampt with the necessity of 
oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, 
in the attempts of their vain-glories, who, acting early, 
and before the probable meridian of time, have, by this 
time, found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby 
the ancient heroes have already outlasted their monu- 
ments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter 
scene of time we cannot expect such mummies unto our 
memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, 
and Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two 
Methuselahs of Hector. 

" And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity 
of our memories unto present considerations, seems a 
vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of 
folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as 
some have done in their persons : one face of Janus holds 
no proportion unto the other. 'Tis too late to be am- 
bitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or 
time may be too short for our designs. To extend our 
memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, 
and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to 
our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a 
contradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are 
ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially 
taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated 
to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally 
constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot 
excusably decline the consideration of that duration 



278 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past 

a moment. 

" Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and 
the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up 
all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which 
temporarily considereth all things ; our fathers find their 
graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we 
may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth 
scarce forty years: generations pass while some trees 
stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read 
by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for 
eternity by enigmatical epithets, or first letters of our 
names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and 
have new names given us like many of the mummies, are 
cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by 
everlasting languages. 

" To be content that times to come should only know 
there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more 
of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan : disparaging his 
horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself, who cares 
to subsist like Hippocrates' patients, or Achilles' horses in 
Homer, under naked nominations without deserts and 
noble acts, which are the balsam of our memories, the 
Entelechia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless 
in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The 
Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, 
than Herodias with one. And who had not rather have 
been the good thief, than Pilate ? 

" But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her 
poppy, and deals with the memory of men without dis- 
tinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the 
founder of the pyramids ? Herostratus lives that burnt 
the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it ; time 
hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded 
that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the 
advantage of our good names, since bad have equal dura- 



AS A WRITER. 279 

tions ; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon, 
without the favour of the everlasting register. Who 
knows whether the best of men be known ? or whether 
there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any 
that stand remembered in the known account of time ? 
the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Me- 
thuselah's long life had been his only chronicle. 

" Oblivion is not to be hired : the greater part must be 
content to be as though they had not been, to be found in 
the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty- 
seven names make up the first story, and the recorded 
names ever since contain not one living centur}'. The 
number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. 
The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows 
when was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto that cur- 
rent arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And 
since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans 
could doubt whether thus to live, were to die ; since our 
longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but win- 
ter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie 
down in darkness, and have our light in ashes ; since the 
brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, 
and time, that grows old itself, bids us hope no long dura- 
tion : diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. 

" Darkness and light divide the course of time, and 
oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our 
living beings ; we slightly remember our felicities, and the 
smartest strokes of aflBiction leave but short smart upon 
us. Sense endureik no extremities, and sorrows destroy 
us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflic- 
tions induce callosities, which are slippery, or fall like 
snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy 
stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and 
forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, 
whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, 
and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remem- 
brances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the ed^e of re- 



280 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

petitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes 
of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls. A 
good way to continue their memories, while having the 
advantage of plural successions, they could not but act 
something remarkable in such a variety of beings, and 
enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumula- 
tion of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather 
than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were 
content to recede into the common being, and make one 
particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more 
than to return into their unknown and divine original 
again. Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, con- 
serving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the 
return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the 
wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which Cam- 
byses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mum- 
my is become merchandize, Mizraim cures wounds, and 
Pharaoh is sold for balsams. 

" In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any 
patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon : 
men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the 
sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in 
heaven. The various cosmography of that part hath 
already varied the names of contrived constellations ; 
Kimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dog-star. 
While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we find 
they are but like the earth ; durable in their main bodies, 
alterable in their parts : whereof beside comets and new 
stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that 
wander about the sun, with Phaeton's favour, would make 
clear conviction. 

" There is nothing immortal but immortality ; whatever 
hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others 
have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruc- 
tion, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that 
cannot destroy itself; and the highest strain of omnlpo- 
tency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even 



AS A WRITER, 281 

from the poiver of itself. But the sufficiency of Christian 
immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of 
either state after death makes a folly of posthumous me- 
mory. God, who can only destroy our souls, and hath 
assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names, 
hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so 
much of chance, that the boldest expectants have found 
unhappy frustration ; and to hold long subsistence, seems 
but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, 
splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing 
Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting 
ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. 

" Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun 
within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames 
seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected 
precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus ; but the 
wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, 
and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, 
wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, 
pitch, a mourner, and an urn. 

" Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus ; 
the man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by 
one, invisibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscu- 
rity, though not without some marks directing human 
discovery. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or 
burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great ex- 
amples of perpetuity, in their long and living memory, in 
strict account being still on this side death, and having a 
late part yet to act on this stage of earth. If in the decre- 
tory term of the world we shall not all die, but be changed, 
according to received translation, the last day will make 
but few graves ; at least quick resurrections will anticipate 
lasting sepultures ; some graves will be opened before they 
be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many 
that feared to die shall groan that they can die but once, 
the dismal state is the second and living death, when 
life puts despair on the damned ; when men shall wish 



282 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

the covering of mountains, not of monuments, and anni- 
hilation shall be courted. 

" While some have studied monuments, others have 
studiously declined them ; and some have been so vainly 
boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their graves ; 
wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river 
turned to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla, that 
thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent re- 
venging tongues and stones thrown at his monument. 
Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal 
so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet 
them in the next, who, when they die, make no commo- 
tion among the dead, and are not touched with that 
poetical taunt of Isaiah. 

*' Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities 
of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. 
But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Chris- 
tian religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sits on the 
neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpe- 
tuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters 
and be poorly seen in angles of contingency. 

" Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of fu- 
turity, made little more of this world than the world 
that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of 
pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any 
have been so happy as truly to understand Christian anni- 
hilation, ecstasies, exolution, Hquefaction, transformation, 
the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression 
into the divine shadow, they have already had a handsome 
anticipation of heaven ; the glory of the world is surely 
over, and the earth in ashes unto them. 

" To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their pro- 
ductions, to exist in their names, and predicament of 
Chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, 
and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is 
nothing in the metaphysics of true belief. To live indeed 
is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope but 



AS A WRITER. 283 

an evidence in noble believers : 'tis all one to lie in St In- 
nocent's church-yard as in the sands of Egypt ; ready to 
be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content 
with six foot as the moles of Adrianus." 

I subjoin the following account of this extra- 
ordinary writer's style, said to be written in a 
blank leaf of his works by Mr Coleridge : 

^' Sir Thomas Brown is among my first fa- 
vourites. Rich in various knowledge, exuberant 
in conceptions and conceits ; contemplative, 
imaginative, often truly great and magnificent 
in his style and diction, though, doubtless, too 
often big, stiff, and hyperlatinistic: thus I might, 
without admixture of falsehood, describe Sir T. 
Brown ; and my description would have this 
fault only, that it would be equally, or almost 
equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, 
from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to 
the end of the reign of Charles the Second. He 
is indeed all this ; and what he has more than 
all this, and peculiar to himself, I seem to con- 
vey to my own mind in some measure, by say- 
ing that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast y 
with a strong tinge of the ybn^a^^; the humorist 
constantly mingling with, and flashing across 
the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot- 
silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has 
brains in his head, which is all the more in- 
teresting for a little twist in the brains. He 
sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne; 
but from no other than the o:eneral circumstance 



284 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN 

of an egotism common to both, which, in Mon- 
taigne, is too often a mere amusing gossip, a 
chitchat story of whims and peculiarities that 
lead to nothing ; but which, in Sir Thomas 
Brown, is always the result of a feeling heart, 
conjoined with a mind of active curiosity, the 
natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, 
loving other men as himself, gains the habit and 
the privilege of talking about himself as fami- 
liarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, 
and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while 
he conceives himself with quaint and humorous 
gravity, an useful inquirer into physical truths 
and fundamental science, he loved to contem- 
plate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, 
because he found by comparison with other 
men's, that they^ too, were curiosities ; and so, 
with a perfectly graceful, interesting ease, he put 
them, too, into his museum and cabinet of rari- 
ties. In very truth, he was not mistaken, so 
completely does he see everything in a light of 
his own ; reading nature neither by sun, moon, 
nor candle-light, but by the light of the fairy 
glory around his own head ; that you might say, 
that nature had granted to him in perpetuity, a 
patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read 
his Hydriotaphia above all, and, in addition to 
the peculiarity, the exclusive Sir Thomas Brow- 
ness, of all the fancies and modes of illustration, 
wonder at, and admire, his entireness in every 
subject which is before him. He is totus in illoj 



AS A WRITER. 285 

he follows it, he never wanders from it, and he 
has no occasion to wander ; for whatever hap- 
pens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all na- 
ture into it. In that ' Hydriotaphia/ or treatise 
on some urns dug up in Norfolk — how earthy, 
how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every 
line ! You have now dark mould ; now a thigh- 
bone ; now a skull ; then a bit of a mouldered 
coffin ; a fragment of an old tombstone, with 
moss in its hicjacet; a ghost, a winding sheet; 
or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a No- 
vember wind : and the gayest thing you shall 
meet with shall be a silver nail, or gilt anno 
dominin from a perished coffin top ! — The very 
same remark applies in the same force to the 
interesting, though far less interesting, treatise 
on the ' Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients,' 
the same entireness of subject! Quincunxes in 
heaven above ; quincunxes in earth below ; quin- 
cunxes in deity; quincunxes in the mind of 
man ; quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in 
roots of trees, in leaves, in everything ! In short, 
just turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read 
out aloud to yourself the seven last paragraphs 
of chapter 5th, beginning with the words, 
^ More considerable,^ But it is time for me to 
be in bed. In the words of Sir T. Brown (which 
will serve as a fine specimen of his manner), 
' But the quincunxes of Heaven (the hyades, or 
Jive stars about the horizon, at midnight at that 
time) run low, and it is time we close the five 



286 CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN. 

parts of knowledge ; we are unwilling to spin 
out our waking thoughts into the phantoms of 
sleep, which often continue precogitations, 
making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of 
handsome groves. To keep our eyes open lono-er, 
were to act our antipodes ? The huntsmen are 
up in Arabia; and they have already passed 
their first sleep in Persia.' Think you, that 
there ever was such a reason given before for 
going to bed at midnight; to wit, that if we did 
not, we should be acting the part of our anti- 
podes! And then, ^the huntsmen are up in 
ARABIA,' — what life, what fancy ! Does the 
whimsical knight give us thus the essence of 
gunpowder tea, and call it an opiate?^'* 

* Sir Thomas Brown has it, " The huntsmen are up in 
America," but Mr Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do 
not think his account of the Urn-Burial very happy. Sir 
Thomas can be said to be " wholly in his subject," only 
because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the 
* Hydriotaphia ' about " a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit 
of mouldered coffin, or a tomb-stone, or a ghost, or a wind- 
ing-sheet, or an echo," nor is ** a silver nail or a gilt anno 
domini the gayest thing you shall meet with." You do not 
meet with them at all in the text ; nor is it possible, either 
from the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown's mind, 
that you should ! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, 
because it was " one of no mark or likelihood," totally free 
from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical com- 
mon-places with which Mr Coleridge has adorned it, and 
because, being " without form and void," it gave unlimited 
scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The 
motto of this author's compositions might be — " De appa- 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 287 

Jeremy Taylor was a writer as different from 
Sir Thomas Brown as it was possible for one 
writer to be from another. He was a dignitary 
of the church, and except in matters of casu- 
istry and controverted points, could not be sup- 
posed to enter upon speculative doubts, or give 
a loose to a sort of dogmatical scepticism. He 
had less thought, less '' stuff of the conscience,'' 
less ^^ to give us pause," in his impetuous oratory, 
but he had equal fancy — ^not the same vastness 
and profundity, but more richness and beauty, 
more warmth and tenderness. He is as rapid, 
as flowing, and endless, as the other is stately, 
abrupt, and concentrated. The eloquence of 
the one is like a river, that of the other is more 
like an aqueduct. The one is as sanguine, as 
the other is saturnine in the temper of his mind. 
Jeremy Taylor took obvious and admitted truths 
for granted, and illustrated them with an inex- 
haustible display of new and enchanting ima- 
gery. Sir Thomas Brown talks in sum-totals : 
Jeremy Taylor enumerates all the particulars of 
a subject. He gives every aspect it will bear, 
and never " cloys with sameness." His cha- 
racteristic is enthusiastic and delightful ampli- 
fication. Sir Thomas Brown gives the begin- 

rentibus et non existentihus eadem est ratio. He created his 
own materials : or to speak of him in his own languagi?, 
" he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned 
his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing !" 



288 CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 

ning and end of things, that you may judge of 
their place and magnitude : Jeremy Taylor de- 
scribes their qualities and texture, and enters 
into all the items of the debtor and creditor ac- 
count between life and death, grace and nature, 
faith and good works. He puts his heart into 
his fancy. He does not pretend to annihilate 
the passions and pursuits of mankind in the 
pride of philosophic indifference, but treats them 
as serious and momentous things, warring with 
conscience and the souFs health, or furnishing 
the means of grace and hopes of glory. In his 
writings, the frail stalk of human life reclines on 
the bosom of eternity. His ' Holy Living and 
Dying' is a divine pastoral. He writes to the 
faithful followers of Christ, as the shepherd pipes 
to his flock. He introduces touching and heart- 
felt appeals to familiar life ; condescends to men 
of low estate ; and his pious page blushes with 
modesty and beauty. His style is prismatic. 
It unfolds the colours of the rainbow ; it floats 
like the bubble through the air ; it is like innu- 
merable dew-drops that glitter on the face of 
morning, and tremble as they glitter. He does 
not dig his way underground, but slides upon 
ice, borne on the winged car of fancy. The 
dancing light he throws upon objects is like an 
Aurora Borealis, playing betwixt heaven and 
earth — 

" Where pure Niemi's faery banks arise, 

And fringed with roses Tenglio rolls its stream." 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR, 289 

His exhortations to piety and virtue are a gay 
memento morL He mixes up death's-heads and 
amaranthine flowers ; makes life a procession to 
the grave, but crowns it with gaudy garlands, 
and ** rains sacrificial roses" on its path. In a 
word, his writings are more like fine poetry than 
any other prose whatever ; they are a choral song 
in praise of virtue, and a hymn to the Spirit of 
the Universe. I shall give a few passages, to 
show how feeble and inefiicient this praise is. 

The ^Holy Dying' begins in this manner : — 

*' Man is a bubble. He is born in vanity and sin ; he 
comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrust- 
ing up their heads into the air, and conversing with their 
kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into 
dust and forgetfulness ; some of them without any other 
interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made 
their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful. Others 
ride longer in the storm ; it may be until seven years of 
vanity be expired, and then per adventure the sun shines 
hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, 
into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide 
them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger 
drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless 
nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by 
a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young 
man dances like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like 
a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no 
substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantas- 
tical ; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and 
is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is 
not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or 
crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or 
quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour ; and to 

u 



290 CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 

preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and 
hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him ; to pre- 
serve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw 
him up from nothing, w^ere equally the issues of an Al- 
mighty power." 

Another instance of the same rich continuity 
of feeling, and transparent brilliancy in working 
out an idea, is to be found in his description of 
the dawn and progress of reason. 

" Some are called at age at fourteen, some at one-and- 
twenty, some never ; but all men late enough ; for the life 
of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as 
when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morn- 
ing, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away 
the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls 
up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of 
a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his 
golden horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses, 
when he was forced to wear a veil> because himself had 
seen the face of God ; and still, while a man tells the story, 
the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full 
light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud 
often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, 
and sets quickly ; so is a man's reason and his life." 

This passage puts one in mind of the rising 
dawn and kindling skies in one of Claude's land- 
scapes. Sir Thomas Brown has nc^hing of this 
rich finishing and exact gradation. The genius 
of the two men differed, as that of the painter 
from the mathematician. The one measures 
objects, the other copies them. The one shows 
that things are nothing out of themselves, or in 
relation to the whole : the one^ what they are in 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 291 

themselves and in relation to us. Or the one 
may be said to apply the telescope of the mind 
to distant bodies; the other looks at nature in 
its infinite minuteness and glossy splendour 
through a solar microscope. 

In speaking of Death, our author's style as- 
sumes the port and withering smile of the King 
of Terrors. The following are scattered pas- 
sages on this subject. 

" It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd 
suffered yesterday or a maid servant to-day ; and at the 
same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand 
creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools; 
and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly 
of the latter does not make him unable to die." ... 

" I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, 
while living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the 
importunity of his friends' desire by giving way that after 
a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, 
and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death 
unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, 
and his midriff and back bone full of serpents ; and so he 
stands pictured among his armed ancestors." . . . 

" It is a mighty change that is made by the death of 
every person, and it is visible to us, who are alive. Reckon 
but from the sprightfulness of youth and the fair cheeks 
and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and 
strong flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hol- 
lowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and 
horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the 
distance to be very great and very strange. But so have 
I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, 
and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the 
dew of heaven, as the lamb's fleece; but when a ruder 
breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled 



292 CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 

its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put oi? 
darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms o\ 
a sickly age, it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and 
at night, having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, 
it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces. So 
does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with 
you and me ; and then what servants shall we have to 
wait upon us in the grave ? What friends to visit us ? 
What officious people to cleanse away the moist and un- 
wholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of 
the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our 
funerals ? " 

" A man may read a sermon, the best and most pas- 
sionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into 
the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the 
Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree 
war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where 
their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no 
more : and where our kings have been crowned, their an- 
cestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grand- 
sire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with 
royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to 
naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like 
gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames 
of lust, to^ abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch 
of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling 
colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There 
the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miser- 
able, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their 
dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell 
all the world that when we die, our ashes shall be equal to 
kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains for our 
crimes shall be less.* To my apprehension, it is a sad 
record which is left by Athenaeus concerning Ninus the 

* The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of 
some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 293 

great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed 
jap in these words : * Ninus the Assyrian had an ocean of 
gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian 
sea ; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired 
it ; he never stirred up the holy fire among the Magi : nor 
touched his god with the sacred rod according to the 
laws : he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the deity, 
nor administered justice, nor spake to the people ; nor 
numbered them : but he was most valiant to eat and 
drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest 
upon the stones. This man is dead, behold his sepulchre, 
and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, 
and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing 
but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I 
served to myself in lust is all my portion : the wealth with 
which I was blessed, my enemies meeting together shall 

Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor's style was 
to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it- 
" Mortality, behold, and fear, 

What a charge of flesh is here ! 

Think how many royal bones 

Sleep within this heap of stones ; 

Here they lie, had realms and lands. 

Who now want strength to stir their hands. 

Where from their pulpits, sealed in dust. 

They preach * In greatness is no trust.* 

Here's an acre sown indeed 

With the richest, royal'st seed 

That the earth did e'er suck in, 

Since the first man died for sin. 

Here the bones of birth have cried, 

Though gods they were, as men they died. 

Here are sands, ignoble things, 

Dropp'dfrom the ruin'd sides of kings. 

Here's a world of pomp and state 

Buried in dust, once dead by fate/* 



294 CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 

carry away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw goat. I am 
gone to hell : and when I went thither, I neither carried 
gold, nor horse, nor silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, 
am now a little heap of dust.' " 

He who wrote in this manner also wore a 
mitre, and is now a heap of dust : but when the 
name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered 
with reverence, genius will have become a 
mockery, and virtue an empty shade ! 



LECTURE VIII. 



ON THE SPIRIT OF ANCIENT AND MODERN 
LITERATURE- — ON THE GERMAN DRAMA, CON- 
TRASTED WITH THAT OF THE AGE OF ELIZA- 
BETH. 

Before I proceed to the more immediate sub- 
ject of the present Lecture, I wish to say a few 
words of one or two writers in our own time, 
who have imbibed the spirit and imitated the 
langruao-e of our elder dramatists. Amono; these 
I may reckon the ingenious author of ' The Apos- 
tate * and ^ Evadne,' who, in the last-mentioned 
play, in particular, has availed himself with 
much judgment and spirit of the tragedy of ' The 
Traitor/ by old Shirley. It would be curious 
to hear the opinion of a professed admirer of 
the Ancients, and captious despiser of the Mo- 
derns, with respect to this production, before he 
knew it was a copy of an old play. Shirley 
himself lived in the time of Charles I, and died 
in the beginning of Charles II ; * but he had 

* He and his wife both died from fright, occasioned by 
the great fire of London in 1665, and lie buried in St 
Giles's churchyard. 



296 ON ANCIENT AND 

formed his style on that of the preceding age, 
and had written the greatest number of his plays 
in conjunction with Jonson, Decker, and Mas- 
singer. He was '^the last of those fair clouds 
that on the bosom of bright honour sailed in 
long procession, beautiful and calm/^ The name 
of Mr Tobin is familiar to every lover of the 
drama. His ^ Honey-Moon' is evidently founded 
on ' The Taming of a Shrew,' and Duke Aranza 
has been pronounced by a polite critic to be 
'^an elegant Petruchio.'' The plot is taken 
from Shakspeare ; but the language and senti- 
ments, both of this play and of ' The Curfew,' 
bear a more direct resemblance to the flowery 
tenderness of Beaumont and Fletcher, who were, 
I believe, the favourite study of our author. 
Mr Lamb's ^ John Woodvil ' may be considered 
as a dramatic fragment, intended for the closet 
rather than the stage. It would sound oddly 
in the lobbies of either theatre, amidst the noise 
and glare and bustle of resort; but ^^ there 
where we have treasured up our hearts," in 
silence and in solitude, it may claim and find a 
place for itself. It might be read with advan- 
tage in the still retreats of Sherwood Forest, 
where it would throw a new-born light on the 
green, sunny glades; the tenderest flower might 
seem to drink of the poet's spirit, and " the tall 
deer that paints a dancing shadow of his horns 
in the swift brook," might seem to do so in 
mockery of the poet's thought. Mr Lamb, with 



MODERN LITERATURE. 297 

a modesty often attendant on fine feeling, has 
loitered too long in the humbler avenues leading 
to the temple of ancient genius, instead of march- 
ing boldly up to the sanctuary, as many with 
half his pretensions would have done: ''but 
fools rush in, where angels fear to tread/' The 
defective or objectionable parts of this produc- 
tion are imitations of the defects of the old 
writers : its beauties are his own, though in their 
manner. The touches of thought and passion 
are often as pure and delicate as they are pro- 
found ; and the character of his heroine Mar- 
garet is perhaps the finest and most genuine 
female character out of Shakspeare. This tra- 
gedy was not critic-proof: it had its cracks and 
flaws and breaches, through which the enemy 
marched in triumphant. The station which he 
had chosen was not indeed a walled town, but a 
straggling village, which the experienced en- 
gineers proceeded to lay waste ; and he is pinned 
down in more than one Review of the day, as 
an exemplary warning to indiscreet writers, 
who venture beyond the pale of periodical taste 
and conventional criticism. Mr Lamb was thus 
hindered by the taste of the polite vulgar from 
writing as he wished ; his own taste would not 
allow him to write like them : and he (perhaps 
wisely) turned critic and prose writer in his own 
defence. To say that he has written better 
about Shakspeare, and about Hogarth, than any- 
body else^ is saying little in his praise. A gen- 



298 ON ANCIENT AND 

tleman of the name of Cornwall, who has lately- 
published a volume of Dramatic Scenes, has 
met with a very different reception, but I cannot 
say that he has deserved it. He has made no 
sacrifice at the shrine of fashionable afiectation 
or false glitter. There is nothing common-place 
in his style to soothe the complacency of dul- 
ness, nothing extravagant to startle the gross- 
ness of ignorance. He writes with simplicity, 
delicacy, and fervour ; continues a scene from 
Shakspeare, or works out a hint from Boccacio, 
in the spirit of his originals, and though he 
bows with reverence at the altar of those great 
masters, he keeps an eye curiously intent on 
nature, and a mind awake to the admonitions of 
his own heart. As he has begun, so let him 
proceed. Any one who will turn to the glowing 
and richly-coloured conclusion of ' The Falcon,' 
will, I think, agree with me in this wish ! 

There are four sorts or schools of tragedy 
with which I am acquainted. The first is the 
antique or classical. This consisted, 1 appre- 
hend, in the introduction of persons on the stage, 
speaking, feeling, and acting according to nature^ 
that is, according to the impression of given 
circumstances on the passions and mind of man 
in those circumstances, but limited by the physi- 
cal conditions of time and place, as to its external 
form, and to a certain dignity of attitude and 
expression, selection in the figures, and unity in 
their grouping, as in a statue or bas-relief. The 



MODERN LITERATURE. 299 

second is the Gothic or romantic, or as it might 
be called, the historical or poetical tragedy, and 
differs from the former, only in having a larger 
scope in the design and boldness in the execu- 
tion ; that is, it is the dramatic representation 
of nature and passion emancipated from the 
precise imitation of an actual event in place and 
time, from the same fastidiousness in the choice 
of the materials, and with the license of the epic 
and fanciful form added to it in the range of 
the subject and the decorations of language. 
This is particularly the style or school of Shaks- 
peare and of the best writers of the age of Eliz- 
abeth, and the one immediately following. Of 
this class, or genus, the tragedie hourgeoise is a 
variety, and the antithesis of the classical form. 
The third sort is the French or common-place 
rhetorical style, which is founded on the antique 
as to its form and subject-matter; but instead of 
individual nature, real passion, or imagination 
growing out of real passion and the circum- 
stances of the speaker, it deals only in vague, 
imposing, and laboured declamations, or de- 
scriptions of nature, dissertations on the passions, 
and pompous flourishes which never entered any 
head but the author's, have no existence in na- 
ture which they pretend to identify, and are not 
dramatic at all, but purely didactic. The fourth 
and last is the German or paradoxical style, 
which differs from the others in representing 



300 ON ANCIENT AND 

men as acting not from the impulse of feeling, 
or as debating common-place questions of mo- 
rality, but as the organs and mouth-pieces (that 
is, as acting, speaking, and thinking under the 
sole influence) of certain extravagant speculative 
opinions, abstracted from all existing customs, 
prejudices, and institutions. It is my present 
business to speak chiefly of the first and last of 
these. 

Sophocles differs from Shakspeare as a Doric 
portico does from Westminster Abbey. The 
principle of the one is simplicity and harmony, 
of the other richness and power. The one relies 
on form or proportion, the other on quantity, and 
variety, and prominence of parts. The one owes 
its charm to a certain union and regularity of 
feeling, the other adds to its effect from com- 
plexity and the combination of the greatest ex- 
tremes. The classical appeals to sense and 
habit; the Gothic or romantie strikes from 
novelty, strangeness, and contrast. Both are 
founded in essential and indestructible principles 
of human nature. We may prefer the one to 
the other, as we choose, but to set up an arbi- 
trary and bigotted standard of excellence in 
Consequence of this preference, and to exclude 
either one or the other from poetry or art, is to 
deny the existence of the first principles of the 
human mind, and to war with nature, which is 
the height of weakness and arrogance at once. 



MODERN LITERATURE. 301 

There are some observations on this subject in a 
late number of the ' Edinburgh Review/ from 
which I shall here make a pretty long extract. 

^' The most obvious distinction between the 
two styles, the classical and the romantic, is, 
that the one is conversant with objects that are 
grand or beautiful in themselves, or in conse- 
quence of obvious and universal associations; 
the other, with those that are interesting only by 
the force of circumstances and imagination. A 
Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical ob- 
ject : it is beautiful in itself, and excites imme- 
diate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic 
castle have no beauty or symmetry to attract 
the eye 5 and yet they excite a more powerful 
and romantic interest, from the ideas with which 
they are habitually associated. If, in addition 
to this, we are told that this is Macbeth^s castle, 
the scene of the murder of Duncan, the interest 
will be instantly heightened to a sort of pleasing 
horror. The classical idea or form of anything, 
it may also be observed, remains always the 
same, and suggests nearly the same impressions ; 
but the associations of ideas belonging to the 
romantic character may vary infinitely, and take 
in the whole range of nature and accident. An- 
tigone, in Sophocles, waiting near the grove of 
the Furies — Electra, in iEschylus, offering sa- 
crifice at the tomb of Agamemnon — are classical 
subjects, because the circumstances and the cha- 
racters have a correspondent dignity, and an 



302 ON ANCIENT AND 

immediate interest, from their mere designation, 
Florimel, in Spenser, where she is described 
sitting on the ground in the Witch's hut, is not 
classical, though in the highest degree poetical 
and romantic : for the incidents and situation 
are in themselves mean and disagreeable, till 
they are redeemed by the genius of the poet, 
and converted, by the very contrast, into a 
source of the utmost pathos and elevation of 
sentiment. Othello's handkerchief is not clas- 
sical, though '^ there was magic in the web : '' — 
it is only a powerful instrument of passion and 
imagination. Even Lear is not classical ; for he 
is a poor crazy old man, who has nothing sub- 
lime about him but his afflictions, and who dies 
of a broken heart. 

'' Schlegel somewhere compares the Furies of 
^schylus to the Witches of Shakspeare — we 
think without much reason. Perhaps Shaks- 
peare has surrounded the weird sisters with as- 
sociations as terrible, and even more mysterious, 
strange, and fantastic, than the Furies of iEs- 
chylus ; but the traditionary beings themselves 
are not so petrific. These are of marble — their 
look alone must blast the beholder ; — those are 
of air, bubbles ; and though " so withered and 
so wild in their attire," it is their spells alone 
which are fatal. They owe their power to me- 
taphysical aid : but the others contain all that is 
dreadful in their corporeal figures. In this we 
see the distinct spirit of the classical and the 



MODERN LITERATURE. 303 

romantic mythology. The serpents that twine 
round the head of the Furies. are not to be trifled 
with, though they implied no preternatural 
power. The bearded Witches in Macbeth are 
in themselves grotesque and ludicrous, except 
as this strange deviation from nature staggers 
our imagination, and leads us to expect and to 
believe in all incredible things. They appal the 
faculties by what they say or do 3 — the others 
are intolerable, even to sight. 

'^ Our author is right in affirming, that the 
true way to understand the plays of Sophocles 
and ^schylus, is to study them before the 
groupes of the Niobe or the Laocoon. If we 
can succeed in explaining this analogy, we shall 
have solved nearly the whole difficulty. For 
it is certain, that there are exactly the same 
powers of mind displayed in the poetry of the 
Greeks as in their statues. Their poetry is ex- 
actly what their sculptors might have written. 
Both are exquisite imitations of nature ; the one 
in marble, the other in words. It is evident 
that the Greek poets had the same perfect idea 
of the subjects they described as the Greek 
sculptors had of the objects they represented; 
and they give as much of this absolute truth of 
imitation as can be given by words. But in 
this direct and simple imitation of nature, as in 
describing the form of a beautiful woman, the 
poet is greatly inferior to the sculptor ; it is in 



304 ON ANCIENT AND 

the power of illustration, in comparing it to 
other things, and suggesting other ideas of 
beauty or love, that he has an entirely new 
source of imagination opened to him: and of 
this power the moderns have made at least a 
bolder and more frequent use than the ancients. 
The description of Helen in Homer is a de- 
scription of what might have happened and 
been seen, as ^ that she moved with grace, and 
that the old men rose up with reverence as she 
passed;^ the description of Belphoebe in Spenser 
is a description of what was only visible to the 
eye of the poet. 

" Upon her eyelids many graces sat, 
Under the shadow of her even brows.** 

The description of the soldiers going to battle 
in Shakspeare, ^ all plumed like ostriches, like 
eagles newly baited, wanton as goats, wild as 
young bulls,' is too bold, figurative, and pro* 
fuse of dazzling images, for the mild, equabld 
tone of classical poetry, which never loses sight 
of the object in the illustration. The ideas of 
the ancients were too exact and definite, too 
much attached to the material form or vehicle 
by which they were conveyed, to admit of 
those rapid combinations, those unrestrained 
flights of fancy, which, glancing from heaven 
to earth, unite the most opposite extremes, and 
draw the happiest illustrations from things the 
most remote. The two principles of imitation 



MODERN LITERATURE. 305 

and imagination, indeed are not only distinct, 
but almost opposite. 

^' The great difference, then, which we find 
between the classical and the romantic style, 
between ancient and modern poetry, is, that the 
one more frequently describes things as they 
are interesting in themselves — the other for the 
sake of the associations of ideas connected with 
them ; that the one dwells more on the imme- 
diate impressions of objects on the senses — the 
other on the ideas which they suggest to the 
imagination. The one is the poetry of form, the 
other of effect. The one gives only what is 
necessarily implied in the subject, the other all 
that can possibly arise out of it. The one seeks 
to identify the imitation with the external ob- 
ject — clings to it — is inseparable from it — is 
either that or nothing; the other seeks to iden- 
tify the original impression with whatever else, 
within the range of thought or feeling, can 
strengthen, relieve, adorn or elevate it. Hence 
the severity and simplicity of the Greek tra- 
gedy, which excluded everything foreign or 
unnecessary to the subject. Hence the Unities : 
for, in order to identify the imitation as much 
as possible with the reality, and leave nothing 
to mere imagination, it was necessary to give 
the same coherence and consistency to the dif- 
ferent parts of a story, as to the different limbs 
of a statue. Hence the beauty and grandeur 
of their materials; for, deriving their power 



306 ON ANCIENT AND 

over the mind from the truth of the imitation, 
it was necessary that the subject which they 
made choice of, and from which they could not 
depart, should be in itself grand and beautiful. 
Hence the perfection of their execution ; which 
consisted in giving the utmost harmony, deli- 
cacy, and refinement to the details of a given 
subject. Now, the characteristic excellence of 
the moderns is the reverse of all this. As, ac- 
cording to our author, the poetry of the Greeks 
is the same as their sculpture ; so, he says, our 
own more nearly resembles painting — where the 
artist can relieve and throw back his figures at 
pleasure — use a greater variety of contrasts — 
and where light and shade, like the colours of 
fancy, are reflected on the different objects. 
The Muse of classical poetry should be repre- 
sented as a beautiful naked figure : the Muse of 
modern poetry should be represented clothed, 
and with wings. The first has the advantage in 
point of form ; the last in colour and motion. 

^' Perhaps we may trace this difference to 
something analogous in physical organization, 
situation, religion, and manners. First, the 
physical organization of the Greeks seems to 
have been more perfect, more susceptible of ex- 
ternal impressions, and more in harmony with 
external nature than ours, who have not the 
same advantages of climate and constitution. 
Born of a beautiful and vigorous race, with 
quick senses and a clear understanding, and 



MOPERN LITERATURE. 307 

placed under a mild heaven, they gave the 
fullest development to their external faculties : 
and where all is perceived easily, everything is 
perceived in harmony and proportion. It is the 
stern genius of the North which drives men 
back upon their own resources, which makes 
them slow to perceive, and averse to feel, and 
which, by rendering them insensible to the 
single, successive impressions of things, re- 
quires their collective and combined force to 
rouse the imagination violently and unequally. 
It should be remarked, however, that the early 
poetry of some of the Eastern nations has even 
more of that irregularity, wild enthusiasm, and 
disproportioned grandeur, which has been con» 
sidered as the distinguishing character of the 
Northern nations, 

'^ Again, a good deal may be attributed to 
the state of manners and political institutions. 
The ancient Greeks were warlike tribes en- 
camped in cities. They had no other country 
than that which was enclosed within the walls 
of the town in which they lived. Each indi- 
vidual belonged, in the first instance, to the 
state ; and his relations to it were so close as to 
take away, in a great measure, all personal in- 
dependence and free-will. Every one was mor- 
tised to his place in society, and had his station 
assigned him as part of the political machine, 
which could only subsist by strict subordina- 
tion and regularity. Every man was;j as it 



308 ON ANCIENT AND 

were, perpetually on duty, and his faculties 
kept constant watch and ward. Energy of 
purpose and intensity of observation became the 
necessary characteristics of such a state of so- 
ciety ; and the general principle communicated 
itself from this ruling concern for the public, 
to morals, to art, to language, to everything. 
The tragic poets of Greece were among her 
best soldiers; and it is no wonder that they 
were as severe in their poetry as in their dis- 
cipline. Their swords and their styles carved 
out their way with equal sharpness. After all, 
however, the tragedies of Sophocles, which are 
the perfection of the classical style, are hardly 
tragedies in our sense of the word,* They do 
not exhibit the extremity of human passion and 
suffering. The object of modern tragedy is to 
represent the soul utterly subdued as it were, or 
at least convulsed and overthrown, by passion 
or misfortune. That of the ancients was to 
show how the greatest crimes could be perpe- 
trated with the least remorse, and the greatest 
calamities borne with the least emotion. Firm- 
ness of purpose and calmness of sentiment are 
their leading characteristics. Their heroes and 
heroines act and suffer as if they were always 
in the presence of a higher power, or as if human 
life itself were a religious ceremony, performed 
in honour of the Gods and of the State. The 

* The difference in the tone of moral sentiment is the 
greatest of all others. 



MODERN LITERATURE. 309 

mind is not shaken to its centre; the whole being 
is not crushed or broken down. Contradictory 
motives are not accumulated ; the utmost force 
of imagination and passion is not exhausted to 
overcome the repugnance of the will to crime; 
the contrast and combination of outward acci- 
dents are not called in to overwhelm the mind 
with the whole weight of unexpected calamity. 
The dire conflict of the feelings, the desperate 
struggle with fortune, are seldom there. All is 
conducted with a fatal composure ; prepared and 
submitted to with inflexible constancy, as if 
Nature were only an instrument in the hands of 
Fate. 

*^This state of things was afterwards con- 
tinued under the Roman empire. In the ages 
of chivalry and romance, which, after a con- 
siderable interval, succeeded its dissolution, and 
which have stamped their character on modern 
genius and literature, all was reversed. Society 
was again resolved into its component parts; 
and the world was, in a manner, to begin anew. 
The ties which bound the citizen and the soldier 
to the state being loosened, each person was 
thrown back into the circle of the domestic 
affections, or left to pursue his doubtful way 
to fame and fortune alone. This interval of 
time might be accordingly supposed to give 
birth to all that was constant in attachment, 
adventurous in action, strange, wild, and extra- 
vagant in invention. Human life took the shape 



310 OiT ANCIENT AND 

of a busy, voluptuous dream, where the imagi- 
nation was now lost amidst ^antres vast and 
deserts idle ;' or suddenly transported to stately 
palaces, echoing with dance and song. In this 
uncertainty of events, this fluctuation of hopes 
and fears, all objects became dim, confused, and 
vague. Magicians, dwarfs, giants, followed in 
the train of romance ; and Orlando's enchanted 
sword, the horn which he carried with him, 
and which he blew thrice at Roncesvalles, and 
Rogero's winged horse, were not sufficient 
to protect them in their unheard-of encounters, 
or deliver them from their inextricable diffi- 
culties. It was a return to the period of the 
early heroic ages ; but tempered by the diffe- 
rence of domestic manners, and the spirit of 
religion. The marked difference in the relation 
of the sexes arose from the freedom of choice in 
women 5 which, from being the slaves of the will 
and passions of men, converted them into the 
arbiters of their fate, which introduced the mo- 
dern system of gallantry, and first made love a 
feeling of the heart, founded on mutual affec- 
tion and esteem. The leading virtues of the 
Christian religion, self-denial and generosity, 
assisted in producing the same effect. — Hence 
the spirit of chivalry, of romantic love and 
honour ! 

^' The mythology of the romantic poetry dif- 
fered from the received religion : both differed 
essentially from the classical. The religion or 



MODERN LITERATURE. 311 

mythology of the Greeks was nearly allied to 
their poetry : it was material and definite. The 
Pagan system reduced the gods to the human 
form, and elevated the powers of inanimate nature 
to the same standard. Statues carved out of the 
finest marble, represented the objects of their 
religious worship in airy porticos, in solemn 
temples and consecrated groves. Mercury was 
seen ' new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill ;^ 
and the Naiad or Dryad came gracefully forth 
as the personified genius of the stream or wood. 
All was subjected to the senses. The Christian 
religion, on the contrary, is essentially spiritual 
and abstracted : it is ^ the evidence of things un- 
seen.' In the Heathen mythology, form is every 
where predominant ; in the Christian, we find 
only unlimited, undefined power. The imagi- 
nation alone ^ broods over the immense abyss, 
and makes it pregnant.' There is, in the habi- 
tual belief of an universal, invisible principle 
of all things, a vastness and obscurity which 
confounds our perceptions, while it exalts our 
piety. A mysterious awe surrounds the doctrines 
of the Christian faith : the infinite is everywhere 
before us, whether we turn to reflect on what is 
revealed to us of the divine nature or our own. 

" History, as well as religion, has contributed 
to enlarge the bounds of imagination ; and both 
together, by showing past and future objects at 
an interminable distance, have accustomed the 
mind to contemplate and take an interest in the 



312 ON ANCIENT AND 

obscure and shadowy. The ancients were more 
circumscribed within 'the ignorant present time' 
— spoke only their own language — were con- 
versant only with their own customs — were ac- 
quainted only with the events of their own his- 
tory. The mere lapse of time then, aided by 
the art of printing, has served to accumulate 
an endless mass of mixed and contradictory 
materials; and, by extending our knowledge 
to a greater number of things, has made our 
particular ideas less perfect and distinct. The 
constant reference to a former state of manners 
and literature is a marked feature in modem 
poetry. We are always talking of the Greeks 
and Romans : — they never said anything of us. 
This circumstance has tended to give a certain 
abstract elevation, and ethereal refinement to the 
mind, without strengthening it. We are lost 
in wonder at what has been done, and dare not 
think of emulating it» The earliest modem 
poets, accordingly, may be conceived to hail the 
glories of the antique world, dawning through 
the dark abyss of time ; while revelation, on the 
other hand, opened its path to the skies. So 
Dante represents himself as conducted by Virgil 
to the shades below ; while Beatrice welcomes 
him to the abodes of the blest." 

The French are the only people in modem 
Europe who have professedly imitated the an- 
cients ; but from their being utterly unlike 
the Greeks or Romans, there have produced a 



MODERN LITERATURE. 313 

dramatic style of their own, which is neither 
classical nor romantic. The same article con- 
tains the following censure of this style : 

*^ The true poet identifies the reader with the 
characters he represents ; the French poet only 
identifies him with himself. There is scarcely 
a single page of their tragedy which fairly throws 
nature open to you. It is tragedy in masquerade. 
We never get beyond conjecture and reasoning — 
beyond the general impression of the situation of 
the persons — beyond general reflections on their 
passions — beyond general descriptions of objects. 
We never get at that something more, which is 
what we are in search of, namely, what we our- 
selves should feel in the same situations. The 
true poet transports you to the scene— you see 
and hear what is passing — you catch, from the 
lips of the persons concerned, what lies nearest 
to their hearts ; — the French poet takes you into 
his closet, and reads you a lecture upon it. The 
chef'd^oeuvres of their stage, then, are, at best, 
only ingenious paraphrases of nature. The dia- 
logue is a tissue of common-places, of laboured 
declamations on human life, of learned casuistry 
on the passions, on virtue and vice, which any 
one else might make just as well as the person 
speaking ; and yet, what the persons themselves 
would say, is all we want to know, and all for 
which the poet puts them into those situations.'^ 

Afl:er the Restoration, that is, after the return 
of the exiled family of the Stuarts from France, 



314 ON ANCIENT AND 

our writers transplanted this artificial, mono* 
tonous, and imposing common-place style into 
England, by imitations and translations, where 
it could not be expected to take deep root, and 
produce wholesome fruits, and where it has in- 
deed given rise to little but turgidity and rant 
in men of original force of genius, and to insipi- 
dity and formality in feebler copyists. Otway 
is the only writer of this school, who, in the 
lapse of a century and a half, has produced a 
tragedy (upon the classic or regular model) of 
indisputable excellence and lasting interest. The 
merit of ^ Venice Preserved' is not confined to 
its efiect on the stage, or to the opportunity it 
affords for the display of the powers of the actors 
in it, of a Jaffier, a Pierre, a Belvidera : it reads 
as well in the closet, and loses little or none of 
its power of rivetting breathless attention, and 
stirring the deepest yearnings of affection. It 
has passages of great beauty in themselves (de- 
tached from the fable) touches of true nature 
and pathos, though none equal or indeed com- 
parable to what we meet with in Shakspeare 
and other writers of that day ; but the awful 
suspense of the situations, the conflict of duties 
and passions, the intimate bonds that unite the 
characters together, and that are violently rent 
asunder like the parting of soul and body, the 
solemn march of the tragical events to the fatal 
catastrophe that winds up and closes over all, 
give to this production of Otway 's Muse a charm 



MODERN LITERATURE. 315 

and power that bind it like a spell on the pub- 
lic mind, and have made it a proud and inse- 
parable adjunct of the English stage. Thom- 
son has given it due honour in his feeling verse, 
when he exclaims, 

** See o*er the stage the Ghost of Hamlet stalks^ 
Othello rages, poor Monimia mourns, 
And Belvidera pours her soul in love.*' 

There is a mixture of effeminacy, of luxurious 
and cowardly indulgence of his wayward sensi- 
bility, in Jaffier's character, which is, however, 
finely relieved by the bold, intrepid villany and 
contemptuous irony of Pierre, while it is excused 
by the difficulties of his situation, and the love- 
liness of Belvidera ; but in the ' Orphan^ there is 
little else but this voluptuous effeminacy of sen- 
timent and mawkish distress, which strikes di- 
rectly at the root of that mental fortitude and 
heroic cast of thought which alone makes tragedy 
endurable — that renders its sufferings pathetic, 
or its struggles sublime. Yet there are lines and 
passages in it of extreme tenderness and beauty; 
and few persons, I conceive (judging from my 
own experience) will read it at a certain time of 
life without shedding tears over it as fast as the 
" Arabian trees their medicinal gums.^^ Otway 
always touched the reader, for he had himself a 
heart. We may be sure that he blotted his page 
often with his tears, on which so many drops 
have since fallen from glistening eyes, '^ that sa- 
cred pity had engendered there.'' He had sus- 



316 ON ANCIENT AND 

ceptibillty of feeling and warmth of genius ; but 
he had not equal depth of thought or loftiness of 
imagination, and indulged his mere sensibility 
too much, yielding to the immediate impression 
or emotion excited in his own mind, and not 
placing himself enough in the minds and situa- 
tions of others, or following the workings of na- 
ture sufficiently with keenness of eye and strength 
of will into its heights and depths, its strong- 
holds as well as its weak sides. The ' Orphan' 
was attempted to be revived some time since, 
with the advantage of Miss O'Neill playing the 
part of Monimia. It, however, did not entirely 
succeed (as it appeared at the time) from the plot 
turning all on one circumstance, and that hardly 
of a nature to be obtruded on the public no- 
tice. The incidents and characters are taken 
almost literally from an old play by Robert 
Tailor, called ' The Hog hath Lost his Pearl.' 

Addison's * Cat®,' in spite of Dennis's criti- 
cism, still retains possession of the stage with all 
its unities. My love and admiration for Addi- 
son is as great as any person's, let that other 
person be who he will ; but it is not founded on 
his ^ Cato,' in extolling which Whigs and Tories 
contended in loud applause. The interest of 
this play (bating that shadowy regret that al- 
ways clings to and flickers round the form of 
free antiquity) is confined to the declamation, 
which is feeble in itself, and not heard on the 
stage. I have seen Mr Kemble in this part 



MODERN LITERATURE. 317 

repeat the ^ Soliloquy on Death' without a 
line being distinctly heard ; nothing was observ- 
able but the thoughtful motion of his lips, and 
the occasional extension of his hand in sign of 
doubts suggested or resolved ; yet this beautiful 
and expressive dumb-show, with the propriety 
of his costume, and the elegance of his attitude 
and figure, excited the most lively interest, and 
kept attention even more on the stretch, to catch 
^very imperfect syllable or speaking gesture. 
There is nothing, however, in the play to excite 
ridicule, or shock by absurdity, except the love 
scenes which are passed over as what the spec- 
tator has no proper concern with ; and however 
feeble or languid the interest produced by a 
dramatic exhibition, unless there is some posi- 
tive stumbling-block thrown in the way, or 
gross offence given to an audience, it is gene- 
rally suffered to linger on to a euthanasia, instead 
of dying a violent and premature death. If an 
author (particularly an author of high reputa- 
tion) can contrive to preserve a uniform degree 
of insipidity, he is nearly sure of impunity. It 
is the mixture of great faults with splendid pas- 
sages (the more striking from the contrast) 
that it is inevitable damnation. Every one 
must have seen the audience tired out and 
watching for an opportunity to wreak their 
vengeance on the author, and yet not able to 
accomplish their wish, because no one part 
seemed more tiresome or worthless than another. 



318 ON ANCIENT AND 

The philosophic mantle of Addison's ^ Cato/ 
when it no longer spreads its graceful folds on 
the shoulders of John Kemble, will I fear fall 
to the ground ; nor do I think Mr Kean likely 
to pick it up again, with dauntless ambition or 
stoic pride, like that of Coriolanus. He could 
not play Cato (at least I think not) for the 
same reason that he will play Coriolanus. He 
can always play a living man ; he cannot play 
a lifeless statue. 

Dryden's plays have not come down to us. 
except in the collection of his printed works. 
The last of them that was on the list of regular 
acting plays was ^ Don Sebastian.^ ' The Mask 
of Arthur and Emmeline' was the other day 
revived at one of our theatres without much 
success. ' Alexander the Great' is by Lee, who 
wrote some things in conjunction with Dryden, 
and who had far more power and passion of an 
irregular and turbulent kind, bordering upon 
constitutional morbidity, and who might have 
done better things (as we see from his ' CEdipus*) 
had not his genius been perverted and rendered 
worse than abortive by carrying the vicious 
manner of his age to the greatest excess. Dry- 
den's plays are perhaps the fairest specimen of 
what this manner was. I do not know how to 
describe it better than by saying that it is one 
continued and exaggerated common-place. All 
the characters are put into a swaggering atti- 
tude of dignity, and tricked out in the pomp of 



MODERN LITERATURE. 319 

ostentatious drapery. The images are extrava- 
gant, yet not far-fetched ; they are outrageous 
caricatures of obvious thoughts : the language 
oscillates between bombast and bathos : the 
characters are noisy pretenders to virtue, and 
shallow boasters in vice 5 the versification is 
laboured and monotonous, quite imlike the ad- 
mirably free and flowing rhyme of his satires, 
in which he felt the true inspiration of his sub- 
ject, and could find modulated sounds to ex- 
press it. Dryden had no dramatic genius either 
in tragedy or comedy. In his plays be mistakes 
blasphemy for sublimity, and ribaldry for wit. 
He had so little notion of his own powers, that 
he has put Milton's ' Paradise Lost ' into dra- 
matic rhyme to make Adam look like a fine 
gentleman; and has added a double love-plot 
to ^ The Tempest,' to " relieve the killing lan- 
guor and over-laboured lassitude" of that soli- 
tude of the imagination, in which Shakspeare 
had left the inhabitants of his Enchanted Island. 
I will give two passages out of ' Don Sebas- 
tian,' in illustration of what I have said above 
of this mock-heroic style. 

Almeyda advising Sebastian to fly from the 
power of Muley-Moloch, addresses him thus : 
" Leave then the luggage of your fate behind ; 

To make your flight more easy, leave Almeyda. 

Nor think me left a base, ignoble prey, 

Exposed to this inhuman tyrant's lust. 

My virtue is a guard beyond my strength ; 

And death my last defence within my call." 



520 ON ANCIENT AND 

Sebastian answers very gravely : 

" Death may be called in vain, and cannot come : 
Tyrants can tie him up from your relief: 
Nor has a Christian privilege to die. 
Alas, thou art too young in thy new faith : 
Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
And give them furloughs for another world : 
But v/e, like sentries, are obliged to stand. 
In starless nights, and wait the appointed hour." 

Sebastian then urging her to prevent the 
tyrant's designs by an instant marriage, she 
says, 

" 'Tis late to join, when we must part so soon. 

Sebastian, Nay, rather let us haste it, ere we part ; 
Our souls, for want of that acquaintance here. 
May wander in the starry walks above. 
And, forced on worse companions, miss ourselves." 

In the scene with Muley-Moloch, where she 
makes intercession for Sebastian's life, she says, 

** My father's, mother's, brother's death I pardon : 
That's somewhat sure, a mighty sum of murder. 
Of innocent and kindred blood struck off. 
My prayers and penance shall discount for these. 
And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me : 
Behold what price I offer, and how dear 
To buy Sebastian's life. 

Emperour. Let after-reckonings trouble fearful fools ; 
I'll stand the trial of those trivial crimes : 
But since thou begg'st me to prescribe my terms, 
The only I can offer are thy love ; 
And this one day of respite to resolve. 
Grant or deny, for thy next word is Fate ; 
And Fate is deaf to prayer. 



MODERN LITERATURE. 321 

Almeyda. May lieav'n be so 
At thy last breath to thine : I curse thee not : 
For who can better curse the plague or devil 
Than to be what they are ? That curse be thine. 
Now do not speak, Sebastian, for you need not, 
But die, for I resign your life : Look heav'n, 
Almeyda dooms her dear Sebastian's death ! 
But is there heaven, for I begin to doubt ? 
The skies are hush'd ; no grumbling thunders roll : 
Now take your swing, ye impious : sin, unpunish'd. 
Eternal Providence seems over-watch'd. 
And with a slumbering nod assents to murder . , • 
Farewell, my lost Sebastian ! 
I do not beg, I challenge Justice now ; 
O Powers, if Kings be your peculiar care, 
Why plays this wretch with your prerogative? 
Now flash him dead, now crumble him to ashes : 
Or henceforth live confined in your own palace ; 
And look not idly out upon a world 
That is no longer yours." 

These passages, with many like them, will be 
found in the first scene of the third act. 

The occasional striking expressions, such as 
that of souls at the resurrection " fumbling for 
their limbs," are the language of strong satire 
and habitual disdain, not proper to tragic or 
serious poetry. 

After Dryden there is no writer that has ac- 
quired much reputation as a tragic poet for the 
next hundred years. In the hands of his suc- 
cessors, the Smiths, the Hughes, the Hills, the 
Murphys, the Dr Johnsons, of the reigns of 
the first Georges, tragedy seemed almost afraid 
to know itself, and certainly did not stand where 

T 



322 ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 

it had done a hundred and fifty years before. 
It had degenerated by regular and studied gra- 
dations into the most frigid, insipid, and insig- 
nificant of all things. It faded to a shade, it 
tapered to a point, ^^ fine by degrees, and beau- 
tifully less.'^ I do not believe there is a single 
play of this period which could be read with 
any degree of interest or even patience, by a 
modern reader of poetry, if we except the pro- 
ductions of Southern, Lillo and Moore, the 
authors of ' The Gamester,' ' Oroonoko,' and 
* Fatal Curiosity,' and who, instead of mounting 
on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, 
went out of the established road to seek for 
truth and nature and eflect in the commonest 
]ife and lowest situations. In short, the only 
tragedy of this period is that to which their 
productions gave a name, and which has been 
called in contradistinction by the French, and 
with an express provision for its merits and de- 
fects, the ' Tragedie bourgeoise,^ An anecdote 
is told of the first of these writers by Gray, in 
one of his letters, dated from Horace Walpole's 
country-seat, about the year 1740, who says, 
^' Old Mr Southern is here, who is now above 
80 : a very agreeable old man, at least I think 
so when I look in his face, and think of Isa- 
bella and Oroonoko.^' It is pleasant to see these 
traits of attachment and gratitude kept up in 
successive generations of poets to one another, 
and also to find that the same works of genius 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 323 

that have ^< sent us weeping to our beds/^ and 
made us " rise sadder and wiser on the morrow 
morn/' have excited just the same fondness of 
affection in others before we were born ; and it 
is to be hoped will do so after we are dead. 
Our best feelings, and those on which we pride 
ourselves most, and with most reason, are per- 
haps the commonest of all others. 

Up to the present reign, and during the best 
part of it (with another solitary exception, 
' Douo^las/ which, with all its feebleness and 
extravagance, has in its style and sentiments 
a good deal of poetical and romantic beauty) 
Tragedy wore the face of the Goddess of Dul- 
ness in the ' Dunciad,' serene, torpid, sickly, 
lethargic and affected, till it was roused from 
its trance by the blast of the French Revolu- 
tion, and by the loud trampling of the German 
Pegasus on the English stage, which now ap- 
peared as pawing to get free from its ancient 
trammels, and rampant shook off the incum- 
brance of all former examples, opinions, preju- 
dices, and principles. If we have not been 
alive and well since this period, at least we 
have been alive, and it is better to be alive than 
dead. The German tragedy (and our own, 
.which is only a branch of it) aims at effect, and 
produces it often in the highest degree ; and it 
does this by going all the lengths not only of 
instinctive feeling, but of speculative opinion, 
and startling the hearer by overturning all the 



324 ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 

established maxims of society, and setting at 
nought all the received rules of composition. 
It cannot be said of this style that in it 
" decorum is the principal thing.'^ It is the 
violation of decorum that is its first and last 
principle, the beginning, middle, and end. It 
is an insult and defiance to Aristotle's definition 
of tragedy. The action is not grave, but extra- 
vagant: the fable is not probable, but impro- 
bable : the favourite characters are not only 
low, but vicious : the sentiments are such as do 
not become the person into whose mouth they 
are put, nor that of any other person : the lan- 
guage is a mixture of metaphysical jargon and 
flaring prose: the moral is immorality. In 
spite of all this, a German tragedy is a good 
thing. It is a fine hallucination : it is a noble 
madness, and as there is a pleasure in madness 
which none but madmen know, so there is a 
pleasure in reading a German play to be found 
in no other. The world have thought so : they 
go to see ' The Stranger,' they go to see ^ Lovers* 
Vows,' and ' Pizarro,' they have their eyes wide 
open all the time, and almost cry them out 
before they come away, and therefore they go 
again. There is something in the style that hits 
the temper of men's minds ; that, if it does not 
hold the mirror up to nature, yet " shows the 
very age and body of the time, its form and 
pressure." It embodies, it sets off* and aggran- 
dizes in all the pomp of action, in all the vehe- 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 325 

mence of hyperbolical declamation, in scenery, 
in dress, in music, in the glare of the senses, 
and the glow of sympathy, the extreme opinions 
which are floating in our time, and which have 
struck their roots deep and wide below the sur- 
face of the public mind. We are no longer 
as formerly, heroes in warlike enterprise; 
martyrs to religious faith; but we are all the 
partisans of a political system, and devotees to 
some theory of moral sentiments. The modern 
style of tragedy is not assuredly made up of 
pompous common-place, but it is a tissue of 
philosophical, political, and moral paradoxes. I 
am not saying whether these paradoxes are true 
or false : all that I mean to state is, that they 
are utterly at variance with old opinions, with 
established rules and existing institutions; that 
it is this tug of war between the inert prejudice 
and the startling novelty which is to batter it 
down (first on the stage of the theatre, and after- 
wards on the stage of the world) that gives the 
excitement and the zest. We see the natural 
always pitted against the social man ; and the 
majority who are not of the privileged classes, 
take part with the former. The hero is a soil; of 
metaphysical Orson, armed not with teeth and a 
club, but with hard sayings and unanswerable 
sentences, ticketed and labelled with extracts 
and mottos from the modern philosophy. This 
common representative of mankind is a natural 
son of some feudal lord, or wealthy baron : and 



326 ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 

he comes to claim, as a matter of course and of 
simple equity, the rich reversion of the title and 
estates to which he has a right by the bounty of 
nature and the privilege of his birth. This 
produces a very edifying scene, and the proud, 
unfeeling, unprincipled baron is hooted from 
the stage. A young woman, a sempstress, or a 
waiting-maid of much beauty and accomplish- 
ment, who would not think of matching with a 
fellow of low birth or fortune for the world, falls 
in love with the heir of an immense estate out of 
pure regard to his mind and person, and thinks 
it strange that rank and opulence do not follow 
as natural appendages in the train of sentiment. 
A lady of fashion, wit, and beauty, forfeits the 
sanctity of her marriage- vow, but preserves the 
inviolability of her sentiments and character, 

" Pure in the last recesses of the mind" — 

and triumphs over false opinion and prejudice, 
like gold out of the fire, the brighter for the 
ordeal. A young man turns robber and captain 
of a gang of banditti ; and the wonder is to see 
the heroic ardour of his sentiments, his aspira- 
tions after the most godlike goodness and un- 
sullied reputation, working their way through 
the repulsiveness of his situation, and making 
use of fortune only as a foil to nature. The 
principle of contrast and contradiction is here 
made use of, and no other. All qualities are 
reversed: virtue is always at odds with vice, 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 327 

^^ which shall be which :" the internal character 
and external situation, the actions and the sen- 
timents, are never in accord : you are to judge 
of everything by contraries : those that exalt 
themselves are abased, and those that should 
be humbled are exalted : the high places and 
strongholds of power and greatness are crum- 
bled in the dust ; opinions totter, feelings are 
brought into question, and the world is turned 
upside down, with all things in it ! — " There is 
some soul of goodness in things evil'' — ^and 
there is some soul of goodness in all this. The 
world and everything in it is not just what it 
ought to be, or what it pretends to be ; or such 
extravagant and prodigious paradoxes would be 
driven from the stage — would meet with sym- 
pathy in no human breast, high or low, young 
or old. '' There^s something rotten in the state of 
Denmark,^^ Opinion is not truth : appearance 
is not reality : power is not beneficence : rank 
is not wisdom : nobility is not the only virtue : 
riches are not happiness : desert and success are 
different things : actions do not always speak 
the character any more than words. We feel 
this, and do justice to the romantic extravagance 
of the German Muse. 

In Germany, where this outre style of treat- 
ing everything established and adventitious 
was carried to its height, there were, as we learn 
from ^ The Sorrows of Werter/seven-and- twenty 
ranks in society, each raised above the other, 



328 ON THE GERMAN DfTAMA, 

and of which the one above did not speak to the 
one below it. Is it wonderful that the poets an(l 
philosophers of Germany, the discontented men 
of talent, who thought and mourned for them- 
selves and their fellows, the Goethes, the Les- 
sings, the S chillers, the Kotzebues, felt a sudden 
and irresistible impulse by a convulsive effort 
to tear aside this factitious drapery of society, 
and to throw off that load of bloated prejudice, 
of maddening pride and superannnated folly, 
that pressed down every energy of their nature 
and stifled the breath of liberty, of truth and 
genius in their bosoms ? These Titans of our 
days tried to throw off the dead weight that en- 
cumbered them, and in so doing, warred not 
against heaven, but against earth. The same 
writers (as far as I have seen) have made the 
only incorrigible Jacobins, and their school of 
poetry is the only real school of Radical Reform. 

In reasoning, truth and soberness may pre- 
vail, on which side soever they meet : but in 
works of imagination novelty has the advantage 
over prejudice ; that which is striking and un- 
heard-of over that which is trite and known 
before, and that which gives unlimited scope to 
the indulgence of the feelings and the passions 
(whether erroneous or not) over that which im- 
poses a restraint upon them. 

I have half trifled with this subject; and I 
believe I have done so because I despaired of 
finding language for some old rooted feelings I 



ON ^'HE GERMAN DfiAMA. 329 

have about it, which a theory could neither give 
nor can it take away. ' The Robbers ' was the 
first play I ever read : and the effect it pro- 
duced upon me was the greatest. It stunned 
me like a blow, and I have not recovered enough 
from it to describe how it was. There are im- 
pressions which neither time nor circumstances 
can efface. Were I to live much longer than I 
have any chance of doing, the books which I 
read when I was young I can never forget* 
Five-and-twenty years have elapsed since I first 
read the translation of ^ The Robbers,' but they 
have not blotted the impression from my mind : 
it is here still, an old dweller in the chambers 
of the brain. The scene in particular in which 
Moor looks through his tears at the evening 
sun from the mountain's brow, and says in his 
despair, " It was my wish like him to live, like 
him to die : it was an idle thought, a boy's con- 
ceit," took fast hold of my imagination, and 
that sun has to me never set ! The last inter- 
view in ^ Don Carlos ' between the two lovers, 
in which the injured bride struggles to burst the 
prison-house of her destiny, in which her hopes 
and youth lie cofiined, and buried, as it were, 
alive, under the oppression of unspeakable an- 
guish, I remember gave me a deep sense of suf- 
fering and a strong desire after good, which has 
haunted me ever since. I do not like Schiller's 
later style so well. His ' Wallenstein,' which 
is admirably and almost literally translated by 



330 ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 

Mr Coleridge, is stately, thoughtful, and ima- 
ginatis^e : but where is the enthusiasm, the 
throbbing of hope and fear, the mortal struggle 
between the passions^ as if all the happiness or 
misery of a life were crowded into a moment, 
and the die was to be cast that instant ? Kot- 
zebue's best work I read first in Cumberland's 
imitation of it in ^ The Wheel of Fortune -/ and 
I confess that that style of sentiment which 
seems to make of life itself a long-drawn endless 
sigh, has something in it that pleases me, in 
spite of rules and criticism. Goethe's tragedies 
are (those that I have seen of them, his 'Count 
Egmont,^ ' Stella,' &c.) constructed upon the 
second or inverted manner of the German stage, 
with a deliberate design to avoid all possible 
effect and interest, and this object is completely 
accomplished. He is however spoken of with 
enthusiasm almost amounting to idolatry by his 
countrymen, and those among ourselves who 
import heavy German criticism into this country 
in shallow, flat-bottomed unwieldy intellects. 
Madame de Stael speaks of one passage in his 
^ Iphigenia,' where he introduces a fragment of 
an old song, which the Furies are supposad to 
sing to Tantalus in Hell, reproaching him with 
the times when he sat with the Gods at their 
golden tables, and with his after-crimes that 
hurled him from heaven, at which he turns his 
eyes from his children and hangs his head in 
mournful silence. This is the true sublime. Of 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 331 

all his works I like his ' Werter' best, nor would 
I part with it at a venture, even for the ' Me- 
moirs of Anastasius the Greek/ whoever is the 
author ; nor ever cease to think of the times, 
'^ when in the fine summer evenings they saw 
the frank, noble-minded enthusiast coming up 
from the valley,^' nor of ^^ the high grass that 
by the light of the departing sun waved in the 
breeze over his grave." 

But I have said enough to give an idea of 
this modern style, compared with our own early 
Dramatic Literature, of which I had to treat. 
I have done : and if I have done no better, the 
fault has been in me, not in the subject. My 
liking to this grew with my knowledge of it : 
but so did my anxiety to do it justice. I some- 
how felt it as a point of honour not to make my 
hearers think less highly of some of these old 
writers than I myself did of them. If I have 
praised an author, it was because I liked him : 
if I have quoted a passage, it was because it 
pleased me in the reading : if I have spoken con- 
temptuously of any one, it has been reluctantly. 
It is no easy task, that a writer, even in so 
humble a class as myself, takes upon him ; he is 
scouted and ridiculed if he fails ; and if he suc- 
ceeds, the enmity and cavils and malice with 
which he is assailed, are just in proportion to his 
success. The coldness and jealousy of his friends 
not unfrequently keep pace with the rancour of 
his enemies. They do not like you a bit the 



332 ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 

better for fulfilling the good opinion they always 
entertained of you. They would wish you to 
be always promising a great deal, and doing 
nothing, that they may answer for the perform- 
ance. That shows their sagacity and does not 
hurt their vanity. An author wastes his time in 
painful study and obscure researches, to gain a 
little breath of popularity, meets with nothing 
but vexation and disappointment in ninety-nine 
instances out of a hundred ; or when he thinks 
to grasp the luckless prize, finds it not worth 
the trouble — the perfume of a minute, fleeting 
as a shadow, hollow as a sound : ^' as often got 
without merit as lost without deserving.'^ He 
thinks that the attainment of acknowledged ex- 
cellence "will secure him the expression of those 
feelings in others, which the image and hope of 
it had excited in his own breast, but instead of 
that he meets with nothing (or scarcely nothing) 
but squint-eyed suspicion, idiot wonder, and 
grinning scorn. It seems hardly worth while 
to have taken all the pains he has been at for 
this! 

In youth we borrow patience from our future 
years : the spring of hope gives us courage to 
act and suffer. A cloud is upon our onward 
path, and we fancy that all is sunshine beyond 
it. The prospect seems endless, because we do 
not know the end of it. We think that life is 
long, because art is so, and that, because we 
have much to do, it is well worth doing: or 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 333 

that no exertions can be too great, no sacrifices 
too painful, to overcome the difficulties we have 
to encounter. Life is a continued struggle to 
be what we are not, and to do what we cannot. 
But as we approach the goal, we draw in the 
reins ; the impulse is less, as we have not so far 
to go; as we see objects nearer, we become less 
sanguine in the pursuit : it is not the despair of 
not attaining, so much as knowing that there is 
nothing worth obtaining, and the fear of having 
nothing left even to wish for, that damps our 
ardour and relaxes our efibrts ; and if the 
mechanical habit did not increase the facility, 
would, I believe, take away all inclination or 
power to do anything. We stagger on the few 
remaining paces to the end of our journey; make 
perhaps one final effort ; and are glad when our 
task is done ! 



THE END. 



LONDON ; 

PRINTED BY CHARLES REYNELL, 
LITTLE PULTENEY STREET. 



L£ D 'II 



